Scottish Islands in Focus

“My journey into photography was born from a curiosity about the world beyond my own.

It began in the early 1990s when I started visiting countries beyond Europe, beginning with Syria and Jordan. My travels then took me to many memorable places and historic sites such as Bukhara, Samarkand, Kashgar, Gilgit, Jaisalmer, Pushkar and to countries such as Tibet and Ethiopia that were less visited back then. I also had the good fortune to journey along the Karakoram Highway not long after it was opened, following the path of the Silk Road alongside the Indus River as it made its way spectacularly through one of the most mountainous regions in the World.

This all took place before the internet, so these places/countries were something of a mystery to most people, and I was so fortunate to be visiting them before organised tourism took hold. It was this that led to my taking up photography. I wanted to give friends and colleagues a glimpse of these wonderful, but largely unknown, places and their colourful cultures and people. Those photographs, shot on film in a pre-digital era, are of places and cultures that have changed irrevocably in the last three decades. For this reason, I have devoted one page of my website to a gallery of images from that period.

I stopped taking photographs altogether after just five years when I realised that I was no longer seeing the places I was visiting because my mind was too focused on spotting the photograph. I stopped for something like 15 years. Eventually, though, a simple mobile phone camera re-ignited my interest, and some occasional ‘snaps’ on a mobile led me to buy a ‘proper’ camera once again in 2020. My first trip to the Scottish Islands came one year later with Wilderness Scotland.

I can’t recall what suddenly made me decide to visit Skye, but I returned six times in the two years that followed to the Orkneys, Mull, Uist/Barra/Mingulay, the Shetlands, Lewis and Harris, and the Cairngorms. The raw beauty of the stunning landscapes and the elemental nature of remote life on the islands drew me back. It has a primal quality. There is a texture that you feel as well as see. The skies are big but, unlike most other similarly blessed places, these are dramatic too, with ever-changing cloud formations creating beams of beautiful light. Another aspect, commented on by everyone on our trips, was the strong sense of community and good-natured friendliness that we encountered everywhere. At times, you feel, pleasingly, as though you have travelled back 50 years to a different era.

One outcome of my trips has been an invitation from a central London gallery to exhibit a selection of my photographs.”

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