The day Edinburgh photographer Sandra George’s vast archive landed on the doorstep of the then recently set up Craigmillar Now organisation changed things for everyone who was there. With one eye on the neighbourhood’s past in the form of Craigmillar Festival Society, the globally recognised community arts organisation that paved the way for everything that followed, Craigmillar Now opened in 2020, and had just established a weekly archiving initiative.
A chance encounter with George’s former partner Jimmy Hewitt saw her archive rescued from a garden shed where it had sat since her death in 2013 and put into Craigmillar Now’s care. As thousands of negatives were digitised, a vital portrait of Edinburgh life in the 1980s and 1990s seen from the frontline of George’s lens was revealed.
Also there that day was Lee McCormack, another photographer tending to her own neglected archive after working as a photographer around the same time as George. Where George worked on community newspapers, McCormack’s work charts community projects in Pilton and Craigmillar, including work with long lost community based organisations including Craigmillar Festival Society, WomenZone, and the Magic Lantern van initiative.
“What a day,” Craigmillar Now director Rachael Cloughton reflects. “The series of coincidences on that day were amazing. It was the very first archive group at Craigmillar Now, and I've got a photo of Lee and Jimmy together. Talk about serendipity.”
Six years on, the result of what happened that day is two major exhibitions by George and McCormack. While Lee McCormack: A Magic Lantern, will run at Craigmillar Now itself, Sandra George: Start from the Level will see more than 200 works by George occupy the City Art Centre. This follows several smaller exhibitions by George that began when Craigmillar Now programmed one at the White House café in Craigmillar. Most recently her work appeared as part of the 2024 edition of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art.
George and McCormack’s exhibitions will run as part of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival. There will also be an event hosted by the Wester Hailes based Community Wellbeing Collective, a kindred spirit of Craigmillar Now and champion of the sort of local culture that George and McCormack’s work was rooted in. This will be led by Craigmillar Now’s lead archivist, Anna Mayhew.
Seen together, the work by George and McCormack capture a time and place in 1980s and 1990s Edinburgh. This was a time when it was still possible for those from working class backgrounds to make art through photography aided by a civic and political will that recognised the significance of such ground level activity.
For McCormack, revisiting her work has become a fascinating experience.
“It brings up a lot of memories,” she says. “You would always like to try and take a good picture of all your pals and stuff. But you could hide behind a camera as well. If you were on your own or with a group, as soon as you put the camera up, people would come and speak to you. It was like a solitary thing, but a communal thing as well.”
According to Cloughton, McCormack doesn’t recognise her own extraordinary talent as a photographer.
“It’s such an important collection that Lee has created over decades alongside all her work with community organisations” says Cloughton. “She's not somebody that craves the limelight, but I think everything that's happened with Sandra, and seeing the communities that appreciate seeing that work so much has maybe changed her perspective.”
As far as George’s work is concerned, for City Art Centre Curator Stuart Fallon, she has left behind a vital collection.
“Her work is remarkable at every level,” he says, “and first and foremost I want to foreground her as a brilliant photographer”
As a way of getting art out beyond the gallery, City Art Centre and Edinburgh Art Festival have teamed up with poster based organisation Jack Arts to show George’s work on a series of billboards around Edinburgh, putting her work on the streets from whence they came. As with McCormack, George’s work is rooted in personal observations of life around her.
“Sandra had such a vast network,” Cloughton observes. “She did so much work with so many people and so many communities. Even when we've had small shows, people have come forward and said they knew her or donated things or brought their own collections. Something on this scale is bound to bring more people forward who have a connection with her. We've always tried to integrate local knowledge and lived experience into the archive. I think that will be the case with Lee’s exhibition as well.”
There is plenty more to come.
“We’re only two thirds of the way through digitising Sandra’s work,” says Cloughton. “It still feels like we're building this archive, and I'd love to be able to track more of the impact that she had, and to collect those stories, and for that to enrich the collection that we've got. I think that was so integral to who Sandra was and what she did. It’s about the people she worked with, and the lives that she changed.”
Sandra George: Start from the Level, City Art Centre, Edinburgh, 27 June-27 September; Lee McCormack : A Magic Lantern, Craigmillar Now, Edinburgh, 6-20 August; Common Thread: Sandra George, Community Well Being Space, Wester Hailes, Edinburgh, 15 August; Level Up: Block Party, Craigmillar Now, Edinburgh, 21 August.
The List Edinburgh Festivals 2026 Magazine, July 2026
ends
Comments