The View from Here: Landscape Photography from the National Galleries of Scotland
National Portrait Gallery, Queen Street, Edinburgh
0131 624 6200
www.nationalgalleries.org
Until 30th April 2017
Daily, 10am-5pm
THIS collection of images from the National Galleries’ collections is a wonderful insight into the history of landscape photography from the Victorian age of grand tours and the emerging art of the daguerreotype to the digitally-produced images of our own time. It’s not that simple, of course, for there are always exceptions to the chronological march of things, from the contemporary photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper, who uses an early Victorian box camera to capture, close up, silver gelatine images of rivers to the inventors of the stereoscope, who succeeded in producing 3d photographic images over 150 years ago.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, the inventor of the Holmes Stereoscopic viewer (some 30 years after the invention of the first stereoscope), certainly knew its worth, describing it – with no little modesty – as “a new epoch in the history of human progress.” It certainly caused a stir in its day and has a fascination now, not least in the images here collected, including climbers roped up on the treacherous Mer de Glace, just to the north of Mont Blanc.
Landscape appears in many guises, from staggering images taken to communicate its awe-inspiring grandeur, to images captured to reveal its destruction. There are the first ‘tourist’ postcard shots of Niagara Falls, courtesy of Platt D Babbitt who set up his camera with the express purpose of cornering the emerging tourist market, to Francis Frith’s 1850s shots of the pyramids, which would have seemed inconceivably awe-inspiring to a largely unfamiliar audience. Photographers take to the air, too, from Alfred G Buckham’s superb shot of Edinburgh from the air, biplane teetering high above the castle, to Patricia MacDonald’s far more recent, disorienting shots of Saltmarsh channels filtering their way through the flats.
Sarah Urwin Jones
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