“O, wad some Power the giftie gie usTo see oursels as others see us!” Those may be two of Robert Burns’ most oft-quoted lines, relecting that while Scotland has never been shy at looking in on itself, we have lacked the ability or awareness to view our nation from the perspective of outsiders. Document Scotland […]
Over here at Document Scotland we’re always keen to see other documentary style photography from Scotland and are always open to submissions of work with a view to featuring it, helping share it, and helping promote photography within Scotland. Niamh McInally emailed us with her ‘Loss of the Beautiful Game’ portfolio below, which I’d already […]
We’ll be coming, we’ll be coming,We’ll be coming down the road. When you hear the noise of the Tartan Army boys,We’ll be coming down the road. After an absence of 23 years, Scotland’s men’s national team finally qualified for the finals of a major international football tournament. It was a moment of celebration and then […]
You may have noticed in the last week or two that Rangers Football Club in Glasgow have won the Scottish Premiership, denying their arch rivals Celtic FC, on the other side of the city, the chance to win ten titles in a row. Around the city posters have gone up, and graffiti appearing, #RFC55, the […]
Football has always held a grim fascination for me. From my youth, spent grubbing around the fetid underbelly of Scottish soccer as a die-hard Meadowbank Thistle supporter, to my current incarnation as a documentary photographer and some-time chronicler of the national game, what interests me most is not the multi-million pound wasters or the diving […]
Home is where the heart is, especially when you are a football fan. A home fixture has an almost religious significance. For a lapsed Catholic like myself it has a sacramental quality. Match day is a holy day of obligation. Or sometimes a sorrowful mystery. I left Dundee in 1980 at the age of 18 […]
Trying to keep up to date with the current tumultuous news of life on Twitter it’s heartening to scroll to a Tweet which shows images and catches your eyes. Such has been the way this past week or so when I’ve discovered two photographers posting old images of Glasgow and beyond. I dropped them both a note, […]
It’s Saturday afternoon during the coronavirus outbreak and I have the blues. Our football grounds, like the cities and towns across the country, are silent and empty. Like everyone else, I won’t be going to a game today. There’s something particularly sad and sombre for a football fan to see our stadiums unused and redundant. […]
The memories are still ripe in my mind. The rain sliding in a grey sheet across the train window, the cold air colliding with our faces and the wind catching our breath as we alight from the train at the inappropriately-named Coatbridge Sunnyside station. In the distance, piercing the sodden winter gloom, bright stripes of […]
Document Scotland are very pleased to announce that we’re being represented in the inaugural Flow PhotoFestival, with two bodies of work. The new photography festival takes place across the Highlands of Scotland throughout September. Colin McPherson’s images of Scottish football culture, the When Saturday Comes series, are on show at the Eden Court, Bishops Rd, Inverness, IV3 5SA. From 2nd […]
Cliftonhill is one of the most evocative grounds in Scottish football, yet one suspects hardly anyone in Scotland could describe what it looks like or even – given Albion Rovers’ name – where it is. Photographer Iain McLean has spent many years visiting the ground as a fan and a photographer. His project, entitled More […]
On Thursday 7th April at 6pm Colin McPherson will be in conversation with writer Kevin Williamson. The event is free. All are welcome!
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 […]
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 […]
It was the second Rangers away game I’d been to for my, at that time, new project ‘Life In The 3rd’. I wished to follow Rangers FC as they travelled around the country and through the Scottish footballing 3rd Division, taking in the small towns and lesser stadiums of the land. I’d just recently returned […]
In 2012, Glasgow Rangers Football Club were wound up and relegated. They started again at the bottom of Scottish Football League. Document Scotland’s Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert followed te team as they embarked on life in the Third Division. ‘These images are part of an ongoing project, a document of an unusual, exciting and historically unprecedented year […]
In all my years working as an editorial photographer in Scotland I always tried to stay away from shooting the obligatory football matches. It isn’t that I didn’t like football, or didn’t follow the results, just that I had no desire to sit and photograph football games on Saturday afternoons or on wet Wednesday nights. […]