Dovecot Studios,
Edinburgh
September 27th-October
26th
When documentary
film-maker David Peat, who followed Billy Connolly's 1976 tour of
Northern Ireland in Big Banana Feet, discovered he had cancer, he
decided to unearth his extensive archive of still photographs taken
over a forty year period while on location around the world. These
included early shots taken of children on the streets of the Gorbals
in 1968, a theme which he applied with warmth and compassion to his
subjects wherever they happened to be.
When a selection of
these images was shown at Street Level in 2012, the same year of
Pear's passing, it was named in this august organ as one of the best
exhibitions of the year. Now expanded to embrace the full span of
Peat's canon, this retrospective at the Dovecot coincides with the
launch of a book of Peat's work that reveals a fascinating social
document as well as the eye of a true artist.
“It's really two
exhibitions in one,” explains Peat's widow, Trish Maclaurin. “David
shot the early stuff in the Gorbals for a portfolio when he was
trying to get into TV. Then there's the international lot, which,
when he found out he had cancer, he selected from about 10,000
negatives. David always talked of wanting to leave a legacy, because
he wasn't bright at school, and had a terrible time. Working on the
exhibition has been good for me and the family as well.”
While she has lived
with Peat's vast collection for most of her life, if Maclaurin had to
pick a favourite image, it would be “one of a couple playing chess,
and in the middle is a pigeon watching them. There's so much going on
there, and people can get so many different things from it.”
The List, September 2013
ends
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