This “now page” is a hub for my current activities.
I live in Edinburgh and am currently Research Principal for the WS Society who can also be seen on Twitter and on Instagram. Under the WS Society umbrella, I am also the administrator for the local children’s education charity John Watson’s Trust.
I am on Bluesky, Mastodon, Substack, Twitter and Linkedin: my photographs are at Lixmount. My former Twitter account is now purely an archive.
My current projects are:
- A short book about the 1846 Hill and Adamson album A Series of Calotype Views of St. Andrews
- A full account of the life and work of the photographer of the Victorian Chelsea riverside, James Hedderly (1815-1885)
- A full account of the creating of the 1928 “Elliot Book” about Hill and Adamson, and the relationship between bookseller/publisher Andrew Elliot and photographer Thomas Annan that gave rise to it.
In the background, I am researching the bibliographical afterlife of the pioneer photographer Robert Adamson (1821-1848) and the lives and travels of the photographers of the August 1944 Liberation of Paris. For about the last decade, I’ve been conducting a photographic survey of Leith and Edinburgh, some of which can be seen on my photographic site.
Selected publications include:
“The Signet Library” Legal Information Management 21 (3-4) December 2021 166-170
“Five Hundred Years of the WS Society Archive, Edinburgh” Archives Hub Blog July 2021
“Building ‘The Palace of Bokes’: Robert Reid, William Stark and the Signet Library” The Book of the Old Edinburgh Club New Series Volume 16 2020
“The Archive of the Society of Writers to the Signet at the Signet Library, Edinburgh” Scottish Archives Vol 21 (2015) 113–129
Recently completed projects include:
The WS Society online Annual Exhibition, The Signet Library’s Long Eighteenth Century 1722-1835
An online portal for the WS Society and Signet Library’s heritage collections, exhibitions and digitized materials.
I curated an exhibition at the Signet Library in March 2023, giving a talk and producing a brochure – Hill and Adamson at the Signet Library: A Series of Calotype Views of St. Andrews, 1846
I gave a talk at the Broughton History Society at McDonald Road Library on Monday February 6th 2023, A Signet Library journal of the Deacon Brodie summer: The 1788 Diary of George Sandy
I curated The Signet Library’s Long 18th Century 1722-1837 – The Signet Library’s Summer Exhibition 4th to 7th July 2022
I presented a paper entitled “From Chiang Yee to IIIF: 200 years of ‘spreading the word’ about Edinburgh’s Signet Library” given at The Independent Libraries Association Conference in Birmingham on 14th May 2022
A new digital edition of The Diary of George Sandy 1788