Formed in 2012, Document Scotland is a collective of four photographers working together to portray aspects of contemporary life in Scotland through photography. The website features a range of the work we each undertake as well as group projects and community collaborations. We represent stories from individuals alongside collaborating with organisations and institutions to promote and support photographic practice in Scotland. With our work, we look at and tell diverse stories about Scotland. We also support through features and interviews the work of other documentary photographers in Scotland.
Below are some highlights and history of the collective.
2012-13
Colin McPherson, Sophie Gerrard, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert and Stephen McLaren came together to set up the collective. In 2012, we published DOC001, a sell-out newspaper which introduced Document Scotland and our work and in 2013, we staged Seeing Ourselves, a collaborative show featuring the work of ten Scottish photographers held at FotoSpace in Fife.
2014
2014 was a pivotal year, not just for us, but also for Scotland. We had our first exhibition on foreign soil as we headed to Bradford and showed Beyond the Border at Impressions Gallery. We followed this up with Common Ground, a joint exhibition with A Fine Beginning, our colleagues from Wales, which was staged at Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow, and accompanied by an extended catalogue from both shows that year.
2015
Document Scotland’s landmark exhibition of The Ties That Bind launched at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh and ran for seven months
2016-17
The years were busy with a number of public events, including our ongoing popular salon evenings at which we share and showcase our own work and that of other photographers making work about Scotland. We were also joined by Glasgow-based photographer Sarah Fishlock for one year. We took part in the Festival Interceltique in Lorient, France – the world’s largest Celtic cultural event.
2018-19
Exhibition preparation in 2018 led to the tour of the show: A Contested Land in 2019 at the Martin Parr Foundation. Four new projects premiered in the exhibition and subsequently toured venues in England and Scotland.
2021
Responding to the challenges of the Pandemic, we devised and delivered two groundbreaking projects which focused on diverse communities. Show Us Shetland and Highlighting the Highlands received funding principally from Creative Scotland and allowed us to collaborate with young people in the Shetland islands as well as groups of Syrian refugees in the north.
In August 2021 we opened our first exhibition in Germany: Reflections on a Changing Country featuring work by all four of our founding members and was part of three months of cultural activities in the city focusing on Scotland.
2022
We took to the road to stage Show Us Colonsay, a collaborative community project which allowed local people and our team of photographers to produce and present work together.
2023
In September 2023, we welcomed two outstanding and talented photographers in to our collective. Following Jeremy’s and Stephen’s departures, Margaret Mitchell and Craig Easton joined Document Scotland. With them they brought ideas and fresh impetus and a willingness to work together on our plans and projects over the next few years.
2024
The four members of Document Scotland went to the Isle of Jura where they ran successful community based projects and made new personal work. This was covered in The Scotsman and Scottish Field.
We are committed to documentary photography in Scotland and if you are too, you can help us by becoming one of our patrons where we share behind the scenes stories from our four photographers. Thank you!