STUART Clarke has a job every football fan would kill for - travelling the world photographing stadiums in his role as official photographer of the Football Trust.

However, standing in his exhibition - the Homes of Football - in Kilmarnock's Dick Institute, he made a startling admission. ''I'd have been just as happy to have spent the last year watching and photographing nothing but Ayrshire junior football, and, for me, the exhibition would have been just as good had it consisted of junior photos only,'' he said.

The Homes of Football is an ambitious project housing a celebration of all things Scottish football: there is a section on Glenbuck-born icon Bill Shankly; a selection of memorabilia from the future Hampden museum; and items from home club Killie's collection. However, Clarke's artistic homage to our national obsession is the main player here.

Through the lens of his ultra low-tech wedding camera, even the most bloody and snotty of Talbot-Cumnock derbies produces images of a game which is beautiful, and which will delight both the hardened football fan or gallery-browsing granny.

The exhibition is the product of 10 years of zealous devotion to recording what has been a massive period of change in terms of stadia. ''I started the collection soon after the Hillsborough disaster, so I suppose it's my celebration of football as it transformed into today's modern game,'' the English photographer explains.

Yet, while the great new stadiums that emerged thanks to the Taylor Report - Ibrox, Old Trafford and Parkhead to name only a few of the dozens that adorn the exhibition - the real show-stealers are shots of some of Scotland's rougher, undeveloped diamonds. Clarke, who admits that he cultivated his eye for a footie photo through too many afternoons left languishing on the bench as a schoolboy in Watford, is at his best with his old back-to-front box camera capturing crying weans, football graffiti of a sexual nature, or pie sellers at ramshackle grounds.

For a photographer who can pick and choose which matches he covers, the humour and pathos of Scotland's lower divisions draws him north from his Lake District base.

''People in London can't understand why I don't live down there for the sake of my work, or why I am obsessed with Scottish football,'' Clarke says.

I suggest that nowhere in English Premiership would he have been able to find such a moving tribute to a sexual liaison scrawled on a stand celebrating a certain Jonathan Paynter, who it is now recorded for posterity in one of Clarke's shots ''had Nicola Paterson up against the goalposts'' on a certain night in Dalbeattie Star's ground.

The exhibition is full of such nuggets of lore from the foot soldier divisions of the Scottish game, but none perhaps surpass the tale that lies behind the papier-mache sculpture that greets visitors. Entitled ''Sye Webster Syndrome'', the life-sized Arbroath fan sitting on a wall looking cold and thoroughly miserable records a story with enough pathos to make Genghis Khan greet.

''Sye was banned from Gayfield for running onto the pitch and kissing the ref after a victory over East Stirling, and was banned from home games for his trouble,'' Clarke says. ''So, for the rest of the season, he sat on a wall across from the ground to see his team play. Soon he developed piles, hence the pot of grapes sitting next to him on his wall.''

In Clarke's vision of the football world, it is only a short hop from grapes and gripes at Gayfield to Mexico 86, with a breathtaking life-sized sculpture made of wire hanging from the gallery ceiling depicting Maradonna's Scotsman-pleasing ''Hand of God''.

''I've actually got a photo of Henrik Larson doing an exact replica of the Hand of God against Hibs which will soon be hanging next to the Maradonna sculpture, and it looks as though he has practised the move as a homage to the goal that put England out of the World Cup,'' he said.

Other sculptures depict Big Lou the Irn Bru saleswoman at St Mirren, and an unnamed - and maimed - Auchinleck Talbot player sitting nursing a shin gash that would have sent men home from the trenches. ''Oh no, you're wrong about that,'' Clarke says. ''That's a mere scratch to an Ayrshire Junior, and I suppose it's that attitude that fascinates me about the junior game.''

Billy Thomson, of Auchinleck Talbot infamy, emerges as one of Clarke's heroes, despite having shot every great in the modern game. ''Look at this photo of Billy,'' he says pointing out a shot of snarling Cumnock fans chomping at the bit to get to Thomson as he attempts to take a shy.

''The Cumnock fans drenched him in spit, but he proceeded to beat three men, pass it out wide and smash a bullet of a header against the bar from the cross. Then, cool as you like, he turned to those fans, still covered in their spittle and shrugged as if to say 'spit away, but are you as good as me?'.''

Many of Scotland's greatest moments are captured in the exhibition, which has pulled in more than 7500 art lovers so far, such as a remarkable ''fish-eye'' view of Villa Park in the nil all draw with Holland in Euro 96, which the Englishman says is his favourite game of all time. However, pressed to name his favourite shot, he chooses a photo of a drowned rat of a wee Morton fan standing outside Cappielow, tears running down his face.

''That shot sums up Scottish football for me,'' he says.

''Morton had just recorded a hard-fought win in glorious sunny weather, and, just as the fans were filing out, it started pouring and blowing a gale, and suddenly this boy was caught waiting at the side of the road freezing in his short-sleeved football top. Look, his arms are red with the cold.''

The devastation of small boys at their heroes' defeats features in a shot to cheer on the faithful of the exhibition's current Kilmarnock home. ''I love the faces of these young Ayr United fans after they were put out of the Scottish Cup by arch rivals Kilmarnock at Rugby Park in 1994,'' he said.

''I've spent the last five seasons searching Ayr crowds looking for them to shoot again, and I'll keep on looking 'till I find them.''

That attitude seems to sum up perfectly the philosophy behind Clarke's Homes of Football - a dedicated recording of the highs and lows of being a Scottish football fan.

The Homes of Football exhibition runs at the Dick Institute, Kilmarnock, until July 11.