Capital Collections project part 1
- Andrew JL Ansell
- May 20, 2015
- 2 min read
Capital Collections project part 1
Think I’m going to enjoy this blogging malarkey – unless you all get bored with me!
A couple of things came up in my newsfeed today that hark back to previous projects I’ve worked on and I thought it would be interesting to explore some of my past work. One of the most amazing things about being a photographer is the chance to explore places that the general public don’t usually get to see. If you work as I do in collections photography then you get the chance to handle objects from the past that the general public only get to see behind glass.
This was an article relating to Hill and Adamson – two pioneers in photography and art from the 1840’s who used the new incredible Calotype process. The idea was to photograph all of the members of the Church of Scotland, from 1843 where 450 ministers of the Church broke away to form the Free Church of Scotland and then use their likeness as source material for Hills painting ‘The Disruption Assembly’
This is the first time photography was used as an artistic process and remains a stunning and unique collection of images to this day. Hill and Adamson also went on to document many working class figures most notably in the Newhaven area of Edinburgh.
My connection with this is thanks to being fortunate enough to work on the Capital Collections project
where i got the opportunity to digitise Edinburgh city councils collection of photographs held at Central Library (follow the link, click on advanced search and my name is in the artist dropdown) and work with photographs from 175 years ago.
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