Sofia approached Document Scotland a while ago after completing her MA in Photography from Falmouth University. We caught up with her for a chat about her motivations for making the work and her various projects about Glasgow. DS: Hi Sofia – Thanks for sending us your work, tell us a little about the project SC: […]
Document Scotland is delighted to showcase the work of Sofia Conti, a Glasgow-based documentary photographer whose work focuses on social awareness issues. She graduated from Gray’s School of Art with a BA in Photography in 2020 and her work was recognised in the Student category of the Moscow International Foto Awards in the same year. […]
Document Scotland recently found the colour street photography of Glasgow, by Monserrat Orallo Alvarez, on Instagram, and were pleasantly amused by the fresh view of the city, and the humour it provided. We caught up with Monse, over emails and we’re pleased to be able to share her following work. – Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert. “I came […]
There is a lot of debate these days about the role of journalism in our daily lives. Questions are asked as to where we get our information from, and the all-pervading accusation of ‘fake news’ is something which causes a real stooshie amongst the general public and also in the journalistic trade. It’s easy to […]
@EverydayClimateChange, a Street Level Photoworks show, co-curated by Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, is on now at Hillhead Library, Glasgow, until April 28th. Hillhead Library 348 Byres Rd, Glasgow G12 8AP Monday to Thursday: 10:00am – 8:00pmFriday & Saturday: 10:00am – 5:00pmSunday 12:00pm – 5:00pm Another opportunity to see panels from the collective Instagram account involving 20 photographers from […]
Document Scotland’s A Contested Land has now opened at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, England. The show runs until 16th March, 2019, before further showings in Scotland at Perth, Dunoon and Inverness. It gives us great pleasure to announce that our latest show, A Contested Land, successfully opened last week at the Martin Parr Foundation. Surrounded by friends, family, […]
Stephen McLaren talks about his new and ongoing work Edinburgh Unchained. After I finished taking photographs for my 2015 project, A Sweet Forgetting, which looked at how Scottish slave-owners made their fortunes in the production of sugar by thousands of enslaved Africans in 18th and 19th century Jamaica, I felt that there was some unfinished […]
Sophie Gerrard’s images from the Western Isles are featured in the exhibition We Feed The World from The Gaia Foundation at The Bargehouse Gallery, Oxo Tower, London until 21st October. Curated by Cheryl Newman and bringing together an international team of world-renowned photographers, farming communities, farmers’ movements and civil society groups, We Feed the World […]
The British Journal of Photography recently announced their shortlist of photographers for their Portrait of Britain photo project, and we’re delighted that photographers and work from Scotland made the cut. Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert‘s portrait from Langholm Common Riding (from his Unsullied and Untarnished book of the Scottish Common Ridings) was selected, as are two portraits be Edinburgh-based Euan Myles (and […]
The work of Scottish photographer Keith Lloyd Davenport first came to our attention last year when Document Scotland held a portfolio review session in Cardiff at the launch of our Common Ground exhibition at the city’s Millennium Centre. It’s fair to say that tackling the subject of fishermen as a documentary photographer offers both abundant […]
Article by Stephen McLaren By returning to photography as both a craft and a career after an enforced period of absence due to illness, Margaret Mitchell reminds us that personal visions remain across decades.
We’re delighted to read that Chris Leslie‘s Disappearing Glasgow project is getting another outing, this time as a multimedia exhibition at Glasgow Lighthouse space. If you missed Chris’s recent Glasgow School of Art show, then you should hurry along to see this arrangement of the works… Exhibition info: Photographer and filmmaker Chris Leslie is widely […]
Celebrating 175 years of Scottish Photography in the home of Scottish Photography We at Document Scotland are very pleased to involved with the first ever St Andrews Photography Festival 2016 where we will be presenting a Document Scotland public exhibition and a free Salon afternoon of talks, multimedia and discussion about documentary photography in Scotland. […]
This month sees the first new whisky distillery for a century officially opening in Fife. Document Scotland photographer Colin McPherson was commissioned by the company responsible for the project, MacDuff International, a Swedish-own film with head offices in Glasgow, to document the construction of the InchDairnie facility from a brown-field building site to completed distillery. […]
To mark today’s final printed edition of the Independent, Document Scotland’s Colin McPherson talks about his contribution to the newspaper and the motivation behind the publication of a book of his photographs taken on assignment for, or published by, the paper. Document Scotland (DS): Today, 26th March, the last edition of the Independent will hit […]
Our Salon events for 2016 start next month, and we are delighted to be partnering with the University of Highlands and Islands to bring you events across Scotland. On the 18th February 2016 we will be hosting an event from Perth College which will be streamed live to venues across Scotland. We hope you’ll be […]
Happy 2016 everyone – to kick start this year Document Scotland have once again joined forces with our good friends the Welsh collective A Fine Beginning. Continuing our theme of collaboration and partnership to show our exhibition Common Ground. The exhibition opening evening (to which you are all most welcome) is on Thuesday 4th February […]
On Thursday 14th January 2016 Anne Lyden, International Photography Curator of our exhibition “The Ties That Bind” currently on at The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, will lead a tour of the exhibition from 5pm – 5:30pm. All are welcome – this event is FREE. For more information please see here
Malcolm Dickson, director of Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow will give a lunchtime talk on 13th January at The Scottish National Galleries to accompany our exhibition “The Ties That Bind” currently on at The Scottish National Portrait Gallery. All are welcome – this event is FREE. For more information please see here
At a recent Street Level Photoworks ‘In Focus’ event, looking at book publishing, which we attended, we had the pleasure of listening to Lucie Rachel discuss her book-in-progress, ‘Mother Father’, a story documenting the relationship of her parents. Impressed with the work, and Lucie’s approach, we asked if we could showcase it here. Lucie kindly […]
This month Document Scotland’s exhibition ‘The Ties That Bind’ at The Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh has been featured on BBC TV and Radio. Sophie was filmed talking about her long term project about women, farming and the landscape, ‘Drawn To The Land’ on BBC1’s Landward and was interviewed for Radio Scotland’s Out of […]
One of the most pleasing spin-offs from the launch of our show at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery has been the blizzard of positive press coverage for the show. Added to this, the BBC commissioned and made a short film about Colin McPherson’s work, which has been released on the corporation’s website today. Focusing on […]
To coincide with our new exhibition, ‘The Ties That Bind‘, on now at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, until April 2016, Jeremy has published a book of his work, ‘Unsullied And Untarnished’, portraying the Common Riding festivals of the Scottish Borders. The same work forms Jeremy’s contribution to our SNPG show. ‘Unsullied And Untarnished’ is photographic portrait […]
A Stroll Through The Gorbals To walk in the Gorbals area of Glasgow is to walk through a district of this city immortalised in iconic photographs, a district whose name is known far and wide, for better or for worse, and whose history has been captured in silver by some of the great photojournalists of […]
Gregor Schmatz has recently finished a BA Photography at Edinburgh Napier University. Document Scotland caught up with him and had a chat about his ongoing degree show project about Methil in Fife, Scotland. DS: Tell us a little about yourself Gregor, and why you decided to make this particular project. GS: I was born in […]
In the last six months I have been shooting a project which examines Scotland’s links with the slave-based sugar economy of Jamaica in the 18th and 19th Century. I visited Jamaica in early Spring and shot photographs of properties which were owned Scottish plantation-owners owned and which grew sugar-cane using the forced labour of African […]
During the spring and summer of 2014, I spent several months exploring the site of the former Ravenscraig steelworks in Lanarkshire. Once Europe’s largest hot strip mill, the British Steel plant employed thousands of men – and some women – in what was commonly regarded as Scotland’s industrial heart from when it opened in 1957 […]
It’s always a nice way to start the day when a beautiful new publication arrives on your doorstep. What made yesterday even better was that the publication was unexpected, and that Document Scotland are featured in it. The Bigger Picture: The Work of Impressions Gallery is a clever and comprehensive retrospective of Impressions Gallery. “Since […]
We delivered four lovely boxes of prints and a hard drive of digital files to St Andrews this week and are very pleased that Document Scotland’s work has now become one of the most recent acquisitions to the St Andrews University Special Collection. Document Scotland started working with Marc Boulay and the University of St […]
To most right-thinking people, all it involves is 22 men (or women) chasing an inflated leather sphere around a grassy field in a pointless physical activity of no consequence. To the rest of us it’s an obsession: football, otherwise known as our national sport. I’ve been bewitched by the sport since my dad took me […]
EMPTY SHOP, by Kenneth Gray Starting in July 2014, the Empty Shop series came about more by chance than planning. Whilst walking my dog around Edinburgh, with a camera ever-ready, I started to see shops which had lain empty for some time, stripped of fittings and ready for let or sale. Desolate and unused and […]
Over the last few months here at Document Scotland we have been pretty busy, however, we always make time to see new work. Here we take a look at some of the work by graduates from Edinburgh Napier University 2014 which was on show earlier this year in their degree show and also at Free […]
We interviewed Marc Wilson and featured his impressive project ‘The Last Stand‘ on the Document Scotland site a while ago. His project beautifully documents some of the physical remnants of the Second World War on the coastlines of the British Isles and northern Europe. When we first spoke to Marc, he had already travelled to […]
We’re delighted to announce that to accompany our ‘Common Ground’ exhibition at Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, we have self-published an 84-page colour publication, and one which we can offer exclusively for sale here. Including two photo essays from each Document Scotland member, Sophie Gerrard, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, Colin McPherson and Stephen McLaren, ‘Common Ground’ takes a look […]
This important and timely exhibition showcases groundbreaking new work from some of Wales and Scotland’s contemporary photographers. Document Scotland, formed in 2012 by Colin McPherson, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, Sophie Gerrard and Stephen McLaren, are responding to the global audience looking at Scotland at this, one of the most important times in the country’s history. Formed in […]
Last weekend, on an incredibly hot and sunny day in Bradford, Document Scotland took part in a busy and successful day of portfolio reviews and talks at Impressions Gallery as part of Beyond The Border: New Contemporary Photography from Scotland. Sophie, Colin and Jeremy joined the team at Impressions to talk to a number of talented […]
Three cheers for the Commonwealth Games. The metal stick aka “the Queen’s Baton” which she kindly loaned-out for a series of global jogs has traversed the old pink section of the global atlas and has now entered Glaswegian orbit after a dash across Scotia’s hills, glens and shopping centres. I remember the 1974 Games in […]
The opening evening of Beyond The Border at Impressions Gallery in Bradford on Thursday 3rd July was a great success, thank you all so much for coming. We were delighted to see so many new and familiar faces there, enjoying the photography, the conversation, the wine and of course, the Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers. Document Scotland […]
If not the quite centre of the universe, Stirling felt like the place to be in Scotland this weekend. On Friday evening, Pipefest kicked three days of festivities, with around 1600 pipers and other musicians from around the world marching from the castle through the city’s streets. The following day, Bannockburn Live competed for attention […]
We’ve been furiously checking prints, sending work to the framers, proofing text, editing, making phonecalls, and finishing long term projects shot over the last year or more in preparation for our group show, Beyond The Border: New Contemporary Photography from Scotland at Impressions Gallery in Bradford. We are delighted to invite you to the opening […]