Tilleadh Dhachaigh: Home Return
An Exhibition of the Hebridean Photographs of Robert Adam
An Lanntair Gallery: 25 August to 12 October
At first it may seem surprising to find the young Edinburgh scientist, Robert Adam, taking photographs of birds in the Western Isles in 1905 at the age of 20. But his interest in birds and in photography had begun years earlier and both these and his early and lasting interest in the Western Isles may have been influenced by his friendship with the older naturalist, John A. Harvie-Brown. Harvie-Brown was a polymath whose knowledge of Scottish natural history was extensive and he travelled widely throughout the Western Isles. With the advice of Harvie-Brown, when Adam set out as a young photographer to begin recording the natural environment of Scotland, which he did whenever the opportunity arose, he headed for the massive and bird-laden westerly cliffs of Mingulay.
He could not have come upon a more awe-inspiring physical setting and although his prime interest was the sea-birds nesting, according to species, on their precipiced, layered ledges, he couldn’t but be drawn to the surrounding patterning of sheer cliffs, ocean movements and ever-changing skies. The very scale and grandeur of these surroundings must have affected the young naturalist and photographer profoundly and it meant that he was back among these same cliffs within two years, this time making his way to the most southerly tip of the whole island chain, Barra Head. From now on he was not concerned solely with photographing the different birds in their various locations: his work was developing in such a way as to include the physical presence of place. Here were the beginnings of the richly textured images of landscape, often in relation with sea and sky.
Adam visited Barra a few times, his last visit being in 1925. It may have been among the risings and climbs in Barra that he gained his appreciation of the rewards of making it to the high tops to be given vistas of ever-receding shadings of light among the surrounding hills and glens. In the summer of 1937 he was in Harris and in the off-shore island of Scarp. As always, as soon as he arrived in Harris he was hiking high in the hills above Tarbert and constructing a range of enduring images of the matrix of the uplands of North Harris and the neighbouring sea-lochs and the secluded setting of the town of Tarbert, all caught in a moving web of sunshine and clouds. In the island of Scarp he built a similar collage of photographs – a few images which he peeled-off like rich transfers of tiny moments in the lengthy life of its physical formations and the fleeting life of its living inhabitants.
Adam came to Lewis in the spring of 1938. He spent days out in broken, rocky terrain among the hills and along the coastline, but he also spent time catching something of the crofters at work in those early spring days. Where the first has not changed with time, the second has changed utterly. He was very aware that the way of life was not only precarious but that it was already making its way towards modernity. His work gives the feeling simultaneously that Lewis townships are changing but that they lie quietly and immutably in the landscape.
In an age where instant photographic images fly around like confetti, it is a surprise and a delight to return to carefully constructed and layered imagery such as Robert Adam’s photographs. Although they were made some time ago, there is nothing of sentimentality or nostalgia implicit in them or in the appreciation of them, for they speak of people and place and the ongoing relationship between them. As concepts of a fragile and abused planet and of the nature of conservation continue to evolve, images such as these speak not merely of the past but of how we relate to the environment at present and seek to live in it and protect it into the future.
Finlay MacLeod
