OFTEN, our idea of a place is more real than its actual physicality. New York, for example, we will forever see through optimistic black and white shots of the Chrysler Building at the dawn of the 1930s. Edinburgh's narrow streets are brought to life through the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson or, more recently, Ian Rankin. Art, much more than being a descriptive subtext of our knowledge, actually creates places for us, imagined images of reality.

So it is that Gus Wylie's photographs - a body of work dating mainly from the 1970s and 1980s - defines our idea of what the Hebrides are like; or, now that life is lived at broadband speed, what the islands were like.

On Benbecula today, photographers in search of Wylie's material will find copies of his new retrospective, The Hebrideans, in MacGillivary's store, but little of the subject matter he recorded.

The landscape is there, eternal, of course, but the interaction of the people with the place is different now. The woollen jumpers tucked in by a leather belts have been replaced by the thermal fleece; the Rayburn stove has gone and the underfloor heating is in; the Sheffield steel shears have rusted.

And who, after all, would want time to stop for any longer than it takes a camera shutter to close? It is in these thin slices of seconds that Gus Wylie captured an era. When Wylie went to the "still sleeping Hebrides", as he'd heard them described, in the early 1970s, he found them rapidly shaking off their past.

His pictures, particularly his intimate interior shots, are of a very specific time in the islands - the dawn of the formica age when the huge Welsh dressers and the tongue-and-groove wall panelling were being thrown out to make way for the essentials of modernity: chipboard, plasterboard, televisions.

The tableaux are iconic of a time, yet the people are not stereotypes and the pictures lack sentimentality. In the detail they have an immediacy that brings them to life. The messages from the grocery van - the Saxa salt, the sliced bread, the orange juice - have just been plonked on the sofa. The spoon is still in the cup, stirring the tea.

Some images have an intense symbolism. The hatpin as a signifier of the Sabbath; the shears at the fank illustrate ancient husbandry; the washing on the line and the wrecked car against the beautiful landscape stand as emblems of care and neglect. They are all as familiar as folds in a favourite item of clothing, defining the everyday and creating an intimacy with people we don't know but who surely can't be strangers.

Some of the images, and some of the people, I have grown up with. There's Willie Burn's Led Zeppelin embroidered jacket with an oil rig in the background. There's Mona, as a young child, by a loch, alluring as ever. The big open sky of Lewis, the curling dampness of the shore, the dusting of snow on the moor. It was from Wylie that I learned what Skye would look like, and I was not disappointed when I arrived there.

Two years ago, Wylie reproduced the prints in colour in Hebridean Light, but somehow the essential quality of the pictures was lost. They are best appreciated in black and white because, as someone else noted, the Hebrides at the time were still in black and white.

And, as much as Wylie defined the Hebrides, so did that collection of outstanding work define him. Previously the fine art graduate had no reputation as a photographer, although he taught the subject. "Never having been trained as a photographer I was pretty much ridiculed in the staff room of the old Regent St Polytechnic, the oldest school of photography in the country, " he recalls. "I was known as an artist who liked to wave a camera around and that got up my nose because all the people I admired, all artists, used the camera and worked from the camera."

Now 70, Wylie lives in the Roman town of St Albans, close to London, and teaches fashion photography. In his garage is the orange VW camper van he used for his tours of the Hebrides. He travelled there in the shadow of Paul Strand, the American photographer whose portraiture caught the dignity of the Hebridean Gaels in the 1950s.

But Strand, whom Wylie met once, was not a primary influence. Deep in his subconscious were the photos taken in the southern states of America during the Roosevelt era by Walker Evans, the folk recordings of Alan Lomax and the American realist paintings of Andrew Wyeth. A chance meeting with Derek Cooper, the venerable broadcaster with strong Skye and Lewis connections, convinced him that there was a cohesive body of work to be done.

"I wanted a situation where I could get lost in a landscape and insinuate myself in a society, " he says, giving a pretty accurate description of what he actually achieved. "I realised that as an Englishman from 600 miles away I wouldn't get very far."

Following Strand's advice, he found an intermediary who could introduce him to potential photographic subjects. Finlay MacLeod, a Lewis man of letters, became his bridge and his companion on many trips. MacLeod, who has written the introduction to The Hebrideans, describes the pictures as gestalt, a visual representation of the islands that is more than the sum of its part.

Wylie also took the path of befriending post-mistresses, trusted members ofthe community, as a means of working his way into the villages. He recalled the lesson of Bruce Davidson, an American who photographed Spanish Harlem in the 1950s, to respect people's lives. Wylie took that to heart and is still in touch, 30 years later, with many of his subjects.

But it was hard. The twin qualities of rural modesty and the repressive power of small communities make people who live in villages very hard to photograph. Hebrideans are no exception. The postmistress in Torrin, on Skye, refused to be photographed four times but finally relented on the fifth visit.

"She boiled me an egg before coming out into the snow to call me in, " recalls Wylie. "I noticed she was wearing her overcoat and ventured, 'A photograph?'" Her picture features on the book's front cover.

Little details, cyphers and codes in the landscape let Wylie know he was accepted. Also, he took time - a commodity that economics has since stolen from photographers. He developed a style of going through the ritual of portraiture to alleviate the camera's intimidating presence. "After that people would talk and show you how they'd painted the wall, or where they'd buried the dog or how they'd converted a lorry into a drying shed, " he says. Then, sometimes by serendipity, he admits, a picture would come - a man wearing three pullovers, the magical relationship between people and their animals, the Bible resting on a woman's knees.

If you rush through the Hebrides today you can feel that what Wylie saw has gone. Visually, all has changed. And yet, something in the quality of the people, something of the Hebridean character that he captured, remains. No, people don't cut peats so much those days, but inside houses they will still pour tea, that timeless ritual of cups and kindness, for complete strangers. And then they will settle, and a story will begin.

Gus Wylie's The Hebrideans: 1974-2004 is published by Birlinn, priced pounds-25