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                  Photography in Scotland

                  Scotland played an important role in the development of photography, and archives and libraries throughout Scotland hold collections of old photographs.

                  Pioneers

                  The photographic process was developed in France and Britain in the 1820s and 1830s, culminating in the glass negative Daguerreotype process, made public in 1839. St Andrews played a vital role in the development of the photographic process through the early interest of Sir David Brewster and his friendship with Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the Calotype process. Early Scottish photographers included Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill, operating from an Edinburgh workshop below the Royal Observatory in the 1840s. George Washington Wilson, an artist and photographer based in Aberdeen in the 1850s, took advantage of the Victorian vogue for views of the Highlands and experimented successfully with the new wet-collodion process. By the 1880s, through a combination of technical excellence and business acumen, Wilson’s company had become the largest and best-known photographic firm in the world. Other successful commercial photographic companies, from the 1870s onwards, were Valentines of Dundee, who produced albums of Scottish views and, later, picture postcards, and Thomas Annan in Glasgow.

                  Social reformers and municipal photography

                  Photography had been used to good effect by social reformers in the late nineteenth century, particularly in illustrating (through lectures illustrated by glass lantern slide) problems in industrial cities, such as housing conditions, smoke nuisance and disease. In the late nineteenth century photography began to be used by Scotland’s local government bodies and other municipal institutions to record public undertakings. Glasgow Corporation had hired Thomas Annan to photograph the completion of the city’s water supply scheme from Loch Katrine in the 1850s. In the 1860s and 1870s Annan photographed slum housing around the High Street of Glasgow for the City Improvement Trust, which was about to demolish the slums to make way for better housing. The work was taken up by the city’s architects and planners who produced a photographic record of a century of housing development in the city, while the city’s assessor used photographs of buildings as evidence in rates appeals cases (in the process recording many commercial buildings in the city in the 1920s and 1930s. Bodies like the Aberdeen Harbour Board and Clyde Navigation Trust photographed work on improvements to harbours and river navigation.  From 1871 photography was used by Scottish prison authorities to circulate information about criminals to police forces.

                  Proliferation

                  From the 1870s onwards the proliferation of photographers’ studios in towns and cities throughout Scotland made the individual portrait and group photographs affordable for the middle classes. The Johnston Collection in Wick is a good example of this. <https://johnstoncollection.net> [accessed 21 October 2024].

                  Industrial firms were among the earliest commercial users, and some firms specialised in industrial photography. One of the biggest was William Ralston Ltd, a Glasgow firm founded in 1856, which was a leading industrial and marine photographer from 1906.

                  Aerial photography developed from the First World War onwards, primarily for military purposes. Both the RAF and the Luftwaffe made photographic surveys of Scotland in the late 1930s and during the Second World War.

                  Newspapers and magazines began using photographs in the 1930s, and two notable Scottish photojournalists from the 1940s until the 1970s were Michael Peto and Oscar Marzaroli. The development of the celluloid negative and cheaper cameras made photography an affordable part of everyday life in Scotland from the 1930s onwards.

                  Most local archives, libraries and museums have a range of miscellaneous photographs of their local area and they also often hold collections from photographers who lived locally, which may include photographs of other parts of Scotland or the rest of the world. University archives often hold images relating to the research of university staff or departments, such as medical research or art and design or archaeology.

                  There are specialist repositories, such as Historic Environment Scotland, whose staff photograph places, objects or research as part of their routine duties as well as collecting the photographs of other people and organisations. Community archives and heritage groups collect and care for photographs of people, places and events connected to their community.

                  Compilers: SCAN contributors (2004), Editor: Elspeth Reid (2024)

                  Bibliography

                  Beaton, Cecil, and Gail Buckland, The Magic Image: the genius of photography from 1839 to the present day (Thames and Hudson, 1975)

                  Ford, Colin, (ed.), An Early Victorian Album: the photographic masterpieces (1843-47) of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson (A.A. Knopf, 1976)

                  Ford, Colin, The Story of Popular Photography (London Century in association with the National Museum of Photography Film and Television, 1989)

                  Gossman, Lionel, Thomas Annan of Glasgow: pioneer of the documentary photograph (Open Book Publishers, 2015)

                  Gernsheim, Helmut, The Concise History of Photography (Thames and Hudson, 1965)

                  Rosenblum, Naomi, A World History of Photography (Abbeville Press Publishers, 1997)

                  Thomas, David B. The First Negatives. An account of the discovery and early use of the negative-positive photographic process (HMSO, 1964)