Celebrating 40 Years Of Scotland’s Photography Collection

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

From Saturday October 26 until March 16, 2025. Admission free

Amazingly, Scotland has only had an officially constituted photography collection since 1984. But as a new exhibition celebrating its 40th anniversary demonstrates, the country’s role as one of the form’s great proving grounds is almost unmatched – and the depth of the national archive likewise.

Opening this weekend at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG), Celebrating 40 Years Of Scotland’s Photography Collection dips into that treasure trove to pick out 100 or so representative images from the 55,000 available. These range from works by early pioneers such as David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson to modern practitioners like Edinburgh-based Arpita Shah, former Herald photographer Kieran Dodds, and American artist Sant Khalsa.

Broad Daylight (Tricia Malley and Ross Gillespie), Charlie and Craig Reid 'The Proclaimers' from the series As Others See Us, Negative 2014Broad Daylight (Tricia Malley and Ross Gillespie), Charlie and Craig Reid 'The Proclaimers' from the series As Others See Us, Negative 2014 (Image: free) Khalsa’s arboreal themed series is a new acquisition, a result of the gallery’s decade-long project to enhance its holding of the work of female photographers. Trees And Seedlings sees 13 glass negatives of trees embedded in planks of wood, a nod both to one of photography’s earliest technological advances and a more recent invention, installation art. Next to it are similar images by John Muir Wood, though his calotypes date from 150 years earlier and are printed on salted paper.

The SNPG’s 55,000 strong archive includes 16,000 images from the MacKinnon Collection and several thousand more from the Annan Archive, named for Thomas Annan. He’s best known for the images he made of Glasgow’s old streets and closes in the mid-1860s, at the request of the Glasgow City Improvement Trust. None of them are on show here, sadly, though there are samples from the archive and a dozen of Hill and Adamson’s famous portraits of Newhaven fisherwomen.

Among the other greatest hits you’ll find Oscar Marzaroli’s The Castlemilk Lads and Bert Hardy’s Gorbals Boys, as well as portraits or self-portraits by Lee Miller, Sarah Lucas, Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus, Don McCullin and Annie Leibovitz.

Arpitah Shah, Tudong, from the series Purdah, The Sacred Cloth, 2013Arpitah Shah, Tudong, from the series Purdah, The Sacred Cloth, 2013 (Image: free) The Marzaroli and Hardy images are iconic, of course, but the Leibovitz shot is beyond even that: fusing artistry, documentary, celebrity and history, it shows Yoko Ono and a naked John Lennon on the floor of their New York apartment on the morning of Lennon’s murder on December 8, 1980. So no, even the word iconic doesn’t do that one justice.

Understandably there’s nowhere else those four elements intertwine so powerfully. But there are plenty of examples of each one in its own right. We see portraits of famous actors Ewan McGregor and David Tennant, musicians Evelyn Glennie, Scott Hutchison and The Proclaimers, and sportsmen Jamie and Andy Murray. We see Thomas Joshua Cooper’s artful landscapes. We see negatives so fragile they have to be kept in a cabinet under a felt covering, making the act of looking at them not so different to disappearing under a lightproof shroud as the photographers of old once did.

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At the heart of the show, however, is that documentary strand, and for good reason. Hill and Adamson, as well as Thomas Annan and John Muir Wood, were there at the dawn of photography and are uncontested pioneers of the form. They pushed at, refined and in some cases subverted the technology. But just as important is what they shot and how and where they shot it, because often their subjects were real people and real places.

As a result, the best of Scotland’s photographers have often been documentary focussed, and in the early decades of the 20th century that ethos then informed the work of those who preferred the moving image. It’s no accident that John Grierson, the so-called father of documentary film-making, was a Scot. Nor is it any accident that subsequent generations of Scottish film-makers have built on that legacy by making their fictions as real as possible. It’s certainly true of the films of Peter Mullan and Lynne Ramsay, just as it was true of their progenitors, people like Bill Douglas.

Accordingly there are examples of documentary photography scattered throughout the exhibition, from the Hill and Adamson images to a pair of typically unsettling Diane Arbus portraits. There are also five stark black and white pictures by war photographer Don McCullin, one from Vietnam, three shot in Northern Ireland in 1971.

David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Jeanie Wilson [Newhaven 15]David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Jeanie Wilson [Newhaven 15] (Image: free) But it’s the show’s back wall which really celebrates the documentary form and does it by focussing on images of Scotland. Here you’ll find Hardy’s Gorbals Boys nestling among other works by him, but also gritty images by David Hurn (better known for his portraits of movie stars), feted Scottish photographer Joseph McKenzie, and Alfred Eisenstaedt.

Born into a Jewish family in 1898 in what was then West Prussia, Eisenstaedt fought in the First World War and later photographed Hitler, Mussolini and Goebbels. But in the early 1980s he pitched up in Aberdeen to shooting a series of images of the Granite City. If his name doesn’t ring any bells, his most famous picture might: a sailor spontaneously kissing a nurse in New York’s Times Square on VJ Day, August 14, 1945.

Celebrating 40 Years Of Scotland’s Photography Collection is only a snapshot of the archive. But like all the best snapshots, it tells a story.