Rob MacKillop
Edinburgh Correspondent
Romantic Camera: Scottish Photography and the Modern World
Today I went to a lunchtime talk by Roberta McGrath of Edinburgh Napier University, set among the images of this interesting exhibition. To dilute her talk into one or two sentences would do her an injustice, but basically she was saying that...
1. The birth of the camera came at a time when the literary movement of Romanticism - seen especially in the work of Walter Scott - was in decline, but survived in the art of photography. Early photographers presented the image of Scotland's mountains and lochs covered in mists, often of the same places mentioned by Scott.
2. In the 20th-century,The Scottish Arts Council refused to acknowledge photography as an art form. It wasn't until the 1980s that either Glasgow or Edinburgh Art Colleges introduced a photography course. Therefore, modern photography as a progressive art form in Scotland is in its infancy. And photographers appear to still be dealing with a mythological Scotland, but one where, instead of the upper classes at play in the Highlands, we have pictures of working miners at home with their family, among images of football sectarianism, and such like. Cultural identity through the eye of the lens is still being formed, and has many connections (not always immediately obvious) with the early 19th-century photographic topics debated by the pioneers of photography.
Or something like that...
Anyway, the images are very interesting, and this link will take you to a few pages giving an overview of the exhibition: National Galleries of Scotland − What's On − Scottish Photography and the Modern World
