JOHN MUIR WOOD AND THE ORIGINS OF LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY IN SCOTLAND
From: Saturday 02 August 2008 To: Sunday 26 October 2008
JOHN MUIR WOOD AND THE ORIGINS
OF LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY IN SCOTLAND
2 August - 26 October 2008
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, 1 Queen St, Edinburgh
Admission free
This exhibition will be the first to investigate the origins of landscape photography in Scotland. It will concentrate on images produced between 1840 and 1860, and in particular on the work of John Muir Wood, arguably Scotland's first systematic landscape photographer. With bulky camera equipment, Muir Wood travelled by steamer along the Firth of Clyde, exploring the geography of Arran, Bute and the north Ayrshire coast. The exhibition will engage with a wider specialist and public interest in landscape questions and will contribute to a reconsideration of the practice of early photographers currently underway in Britain and abroad. The exhibition will also contextualise Muir Wood's imagery by displaying examples of the landscape practice of other early photographers, including Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill, Thomas Keith, Horatio Ross and W H F Talbot. We witness the emergence of a new creative form as each struggled to express the Scottish landscape imagination through photography.