EARLIER this week the Glasgow photographer Peter Iain Campbell won the Richard Coward Photography Award, one of the subsidiary prizes in the annual Scottish Portrait Award. His winning photograph, above, is an image of his fellow photographer Laurence Winram, taken at Portsoy Harbour.

“The harbour background, with all its weathered markings and lines, seemed somehow alive,” he has said of the photograph.

Campbell has also been working on a project based on a drilling rig in the North Sea. He even landed a job as part of the crew on the rig, because, he says, “I realised that it would be the only way to produce a long-term documentary photographic project on the subject.”

His picture of Winram is not part of that project, but, he believes, it has “strong visual connections to the feeling that I have experienced being out on the rig, exposed to the North Sea.”.

An exhibition of some 61 entries to this year’s Scottish Portrait Award is currently on show at the Scottish Arts Club in Edinburgh. The exhibition closes next Saturday and then moves onto the Gracefield Art Centre in Dumfries in January and the Glasgow Art Club in Bath Street next April.

For more information about the awards and to book free tickets to the exhibition visit scottishportraitawards.com. For more information about Peter Iain Campbell’s work visit his website peteriaincampbell.co.uk