Exhibitions

A study exhibition held in Gallery 4 of the Henry Moore Institute drew on the Hill and Adamson collections of the National Galleries of Scotland to present a collection of photographs that could be seen as mythologizing an important symbol of Scottish national identity; the monument to Sir Walter Scott in Edinburgh.

David Octavius Hill (1802 - 1870) and Robert Adamson (1821 - 1848) were two of photography’s most important pioneers. Working in Edinburgh at a time of great cultural and political upheaval, the pair used William Fox Talbot’s calotype technique to chronicle the city’s many artists, scientists, scholars and clerics. An entirely new and unexplored medium - photography - tapped into long-running debates on the nature of truth, presenting - as it seemed to do - a facility for the objective recording of people, things and events.

The works exhibited at the Henry Moore Institute focused on certain moments in the construction of the Scott Monument. Through portraits of the many individuals involved in the monument’s design and sculptural decoration, and including pictures taken at different stages of its completion, the photographers appeared to be offering a candid documentary of the building process. But the careful posing and exquisite beauty of these photographs also ensured their effectiveness as propaganda, lending artful and suitably romantic undercurrents of legend and daring to an event with important cultural ramifications for the city of Edinburgh and the nation of Scotland.

An essay by Matthew Withey and Rocco Lieuallen accompanied the exhibition.