An invitation to online talk at the Martin Parr Foundation caught my eye a couple of months ago. The title of the work rang some bells, and something about the combination of quiet portraits, captivating botanical still lives and landscapes made me look twice. Linn Gardens on the west coast of Scotland is a place […]
Sophie was commissioned by Perth Museum and Art Gallery to continue her long term project Drawn To The Land, the resulting work is currently being exhibited at the gallery until the end of October. Drawn To The Land continues to be a fascinating journey for me. For this chapter it took me to Perthshire, where […]
Join us this June on Easdale Island for a Salon evening of photography, followed by a day of community photographing, chat and reviewing. Document Scotland Salon Evening Date of Event: Sat 08 Jun 2019 Location: Easdale Island Community Hall. Event Type: Exhibition Time: 8.15pm (Doors/Bar open 7.30pm) Ticket Pricing: FREE Document Scotland’s exhibition entitled […]
Our touring show for this year, A Contested Land, opens on 23rd April at Perth Museum and Art Gallery. The show will run until 23rd June, with talks about the exhibition and work by Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, Sophie Gerrard and Colin McPherson, on the evening of Thursday 9th May, 7pm. Perth Museum and Art Gallery,78 George […]
In the lead up to our forthcoming exhibition A Contested Land opening at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol on 15th January 2019, each of the Document Scotland photographers gives an insight into their work, this week Sophie Gerrard talks about her new and ongoing work The Flows. As a young child, one of my […]
In the lead up to the opening of our forthcoming exhibition at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol in January, 2019, each of the four Document Scotland photographers gives an insight into the work they have made for the show. We start with Colin McPherson, who tells us about his project entitled Treasured Island. “Last year, […]
A Contested Land – new work and exhibition from Document Scotland. Set against the current political backdrop, Document Scotland’s four photographers examine the complex relationships between the nation’s people, history and landscape. Showing at The Martin Parr Foundation, 15th January 2019 – 16th March 2019. “The Foundation supports and preserves the legacy of photographers who […]
Paul Duke’s new book of photography, No Ruined Stone, reminds us that the places in which we grow up rarely leave us, they exert a pull across the decades and often force us in later life to re-examine how we have become the person we are today. Muirhouse, built in the 1950s as a council estate to […]
Document Scotland photographer Colin McPherson will be once again running a series of photography courses this summer. Based on the tiny car-free island of Easdale, 15 miles south of Oban, Colin and fellow photographer, Liverpool-based Adam Lee, will host the short residential courses, where photographers of all levels will be guided and assisted to create […]
Document Scotland was delighted to receive support recently from an organisation called Seedbed, which supports projects with start-up funding. The support has allowed two of our photographers, Sarah Amy Fishlock and Sophie Gerrard to each undertake a small project looking at different aspects of land use in Scotland, with a view to developing the work […]
Tanera (Ar Dùthaich) is a project by Derbyshire-based photographer Kevin Percival which will be exhibited from this Sunday, 18th June, at Rhue Art in Ullapool. The photographs featured focus on a tiny island off the west coast of Scotland, where Kevin lived and worked for several years. Like many of Scotland’s coastal communities, the challenges […]
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. […]
I was really pleased to be invited earlier this month to present a paper about my work Drawn To The Land at the recent conference and exhibition Northern Light: Landscape Photography and Evocations of The North at Sheffield Hallam University. The conference and related exhibition explore the ways that photographic images address notions of a […]
Our exhibition The ties That Bind is now in its final month at The Scottish National Portrait Gallery – and to mark this, Sophie has written a blog piece for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery talking about how she made her work Drawn To The Land. In 2013 I began an exploration of my own […]
On Wednesday 9th March at 12:45pm Sophie will be taking part in a panel discussion with historian Dr Elizabeth Ritchie (University of the Highlands and Islands) and crofter and writer Liz Paul, will look at the history and context of women crofters in Scotland and beyond. This panel discussion will take place in The Scottish […]
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
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 […]
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 […]
We were very excited to hear of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery’s latest photography acquisition, great to hear that nine images from South Uist, in the Outer Hebrides, by Paul Strand have been acquired for the nations’s photography collection. Great news indeed. Below, you can read about the acquisition and see the images, but we recommend […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
It was with pleasure that I followed a link on Twitter today, that great oracle, and found out news that a book of Scottish photography is about to be reprinted. Always joyous news here in Document Scotland. The book in question is Stone Built by Gunnie Moberg, so with kind permission of the Gunnie Moberg […]
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 […]
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 […]
We are delighted to announce a partnership with the Scotland’s oldest university that will see our photography become part of one of country’s most important photographic archives. This new collaboration between the University of St Andrews and Document Scotland will unite some of the oldest photographs in Scotland with contemporary documentary images. The initiative will […]
After a year exploring Scotland’s 96-mile border with England, Document Scotland’s Colin McPherson finally reached the point of no return. Here he explains some of the discoveries he made during his journey from the Sark to the sea. “Photographers love journeys. From its earliest history, our predecessors found new locations, often in far-off lands, to […]
Sophie was really pleased to be invited to take part in Green Week 2014 at London College of Communication this month. Sophie took part in Survival a symposium debating sustainability and its communication and looking at the role environmental photography can play in media representation. Sophie showed a few projects, E-Wasteland and The Dunes and […]
As the old maxim in publishing goes, celebrity sells. So I was delighted to encounter Rod Stewart on a scrubby patch of land, a few short yards inside Scotland. Not the real McCoy, of course, but an invocation to attend a musical tribute to the great Jockney singer at some nearby watering hole. An evening […]
On a brilliantly bright, icy cold, winter Sunday afternoon recently I caught up with Giulietta Verdon Roe over coffee and cake. I knew that Giulietta had made several visits to the remote Scottish island of North Ronaldsay over a number of years to create a documentary photographic project of the population and character of the island. […]
Last week, the island of Easdale was in the news about a threat to a world-class sporting event held on its square mile of craggy slate anchored off the Argyll coast. Apparently the island’s owner wanted to cancel the island’s premier sporting event of the season, the World Stone Skimming Championships, for not providing a […]