Speakers Evening

On Thursday 30th July, members and guests of the Rotary Club of South Queensferry were treated to a remarkable insight on the early days of photography when speaker Blake Milteer presented pictures from the MacKinnon Collection to their Zoom meeting. Blake is curator of photography for the National Galleries of Scotland. The collection, which is shared with the National Library of Scotland, toured the country from late 2019 till lockdown, which allowed the public to give feedback and even supply previously unknown details about the people portrayed. Dates to continue the tour are booked for next year. Blake screened several photographs by David Octavious Hill and Robert Adamson, who worked in Edinburgh between 1843 and 1847. These pioneers photographed all classes of people in their natural environment, an innovation for the time. Their series on Newhaven Fishwives is particularly famous. Small prints of Jane and William Carstairs in 1860 showed the  first woman to give birth under the anaesthetic introduced by Dr James Young Simpson. The Tay Bridge before and after the disaster was shown with a memorial collage of ticket stubs taken from the passengers. George Washington Wilson's famous pictures of the Forth Bridge under construction contrasted with Alexander Wilson Hill's studies of the same bridge with children playing in the foreground, intended to show that photography was not a mechanical medium but required creativity. Three hundred items from the MacKinnon Collection have recently been digitised and may be viewed online. Blake has also produced a BBC programme on the subject with James Crawford.

Vikki Renwick introduced Blake Milteer. Graham Leith thanked Blake for a fascinating and unusual presentation which was much enjoyed by the Zoom audience.