THE NEWS that there is to be an exhibition of the work of Scottish photography pioneers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery next year should be a cause for celebration, you might think, but actually it stands as an admission of the most dismal failure by Scotland, its great and good, and all those who profess to stand for the cultural heritage of the country.
Wednesday’s Herald carried Phil Miller’s report that the show, A Perfect Chemistry – which will, of course, include the famous images of the fisherfolk of Newhaven – is on the slate of treats the National Galleries of Scotland has in store for us in Edinburgh in 2017.
It is being trumpeted as the first NGS show of Hill and Adamson in 15 years, a selling point which is in fact a definition of defeat, given that the institution holds the largest collection of their works in the world, and will cheerfully sell you a postcard of the most familiar
striped-skirted, wicker-toting fishwife in any of its shops.
Painter David Octavius Hill and engineer Robert Adamson became partners in the brand new science of photography in the 1840s, when Adamson’s portraits of clergymen helped Hill complete his huge canvas documenting The Disruption that divided the Kirk in Scotland.
Working from Rock House on Calton Hill, and at the cutting edge of the new technology, they produced thousands of images together, including portraits of friends and associates as well as the characters at the Forth estuary port, and shots of the coast. When the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged its first overview of photography in the 1930s, Hill and Adamson had pride of place at the start of the story, but they remained unrecognised at home, to the extent that the Royal Scottish Academy sold off David Octavius Hill’s own albums in 1975.
When an exhibition appeared at the Hunterian Art Gallery at Glasgow University during Mayfest in 1989, it had been put together by the Mendel Art Gallery of Saskatoon and only reached Scotland after sustained acclaim across Canada.
Two years later – a quarter of a century ago now – the Scottish National Portrait Gallery mounted a show that majored on those Newhaven pictures, as well as looking closely at how important Hill and Adamson had been in their technique, and a ball slowly started rolling. With the Queen’s former press secretary, the late Michael Shea, at the helm, and eloquent advocates such as the SNP’s Michael Russell writing pieces for The Herald, the proposal for a Scottish National Gallery of Photography gained momentum.
The eminently suitable, and relevantly located, former Royal High School in Edinburgh was the preferred location for a story that would begin with Hill and Adamson and include the Annans and Oscar Marzaroli working in Glasgow, Robin Gillanders documenting Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, and the singular art of Calum Colvin.
But all of that fine talk reached a crescendo and then diminished to a murmer in the early years of new millennium. By the time National Galleries boss John Leighton included a Hill and Adamson print in his list of 100 masterpieces from the collection last year (alongside work by Rembrandt and Picasso), the photography gallery was off the agenda. The old Royal High may become a music school, if it is not a hotel, and the work of Hill and Adamson is usually in boxes away from public view, a Brigadoon of Scottish achievement glimpsed once every 15 years.
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