Ambit: Photographies from Scotland

Stills, Edinburgh until July 9/Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow until June 18

www.stills.org/www.streetlevelphotoworks.org

ANYONE who has taken a walk around Scotland’s art college degree shows in the past few years will have noticed the proliferation of artists using photography as part of their approach. But if the ubiquity of smartphones might mean “everyone is a photographer now”, that reality is cast in more proper light by this major collaboration on new thinking and experimental photography, between Scotland’s two major independent galleries dedicated to photography, Stills in Edinburgh and Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow.

“It’s not necessarily by young photographers,” says Stills Director Ben Harman, “but work that we felt should be seen more.”

It has been 20 years since Stills and Street Level Photoworks last collaborated on an exhibition. Both galleries have chosen five photographers. “We were constantly checking between ourselves about how the balance would look in terms of age, themes, etc,” says Harman. “It’s such a burgeoning sector, that there was never a worry of overlapping. We could have filled ten venues.” They would still like to, given the funding.

A wander around Stills shows the diversity. Karen L Vaughan’s disjointed collages of the landscape of declining industries, half documentary, half evocative. Norman McBeath’s immaculate investigation of light in black and white. Lorna Macintyre’s Solid Objects (Roma) is a series of three large images of stone artefacts from Rome’s Capitoline Museum, mounted on marble plinths, using San Pelligrino soft drinks to subvert the darkroom toning process. Kristian Smith uses found magazine adverts to create juxtapositional diptychs, and artist Eden Hawkins plays with fiction and reality in bright still lives.

Photographers at Street Level Photoworks are Margaret Mitchell, Donnie MacLean, Sylwia Kowalczyk, Tine Bek and Blazej Marczak.

“People will feel a little challenged by the work,” says Harman. “A lot is new and very contemporary. In some cases the artists have used the exhibition to experiment. They’re in the early stages of working on things. And that is quite important.”