Scottish Photography: The First Thirty Years and The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography: Encounters in Scotland, Canada, and China

Diaspora, migration and globalisation are subjects that now drive much scholarly study, and the place of Scots and Scottishness has been well secured within this field. Equally, books on the inventive contributions and creative energies of Scots around the world are many, yet surprisingly absent from these discussions is serious consideration of photography. Two recent additions to the Scottish photo-historical bookshelf address this historiographical gap, but in very different ways: Sara Stevenson and A. D. Morrison-Low’s Scottish Photography: The First Thirty Years is a comprehensive research survey; Anthony Lee’s The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography: Encounters in Scotland, Canada, and China offers a set of three interpretive case studies. While markedly different, they cover the same time period and some of the same content. These books are reviewed here together as examples on a spectrum of research and writing in a subfield of the history of photography that has a rich past and literature of its own.