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Document Scotland – The Ties That Bind

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, September 26th-April 24th 2016

One of the main legacies of the 2014 Scottish Referendum will be the multitude of images from all sides that document the pains and the passions of one of the country's pivotal political moments of the twenty-first century thus far. With this in mind, it's only fitting that some kind of collective response is gathered.

Step up photographers Colin McPherson, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, Sophie Gerrard and Stephen McLaren, who as Document Scotland have pulled together some fifty to seventy-five images of Scotland and its people from the front-line to commemorate the first anniversary of such a seismic event.

It is this sort of thing that makes documentary photography so evocative of moments great and small as the human hearts behind those moments are framed in a way that both historicises and mythologises them in the best senses of both words.

While a patina of politics is inherent in such an undertaking as The Ties That Bind, there is no polemic here, with the artists showing off a range of viewpoints that hang together in a way that goes some way to capture the messy diversity of a mongrel nation in flux in glorious fashion.
 
The List, September 2015


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