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.
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