Coffee-Table Notes

The White House   Sandra George’s presence can be felt everywhere in Craigmillar just now. The legacy of the Edinburgh based photographer and community educationalist who died in 2013 aged 56 can primarily be seen at The White House, the B-listed Art Deco former pub on Craigmillar’s Niddrie Mains Road that is now an airy community cafe. Here, the walls are adorned with twenty photographs by George that form a new exhibition showcasing a handful of George’s works taken in Craigmillar between 1988 and 1994.   The White House is the perfect location for George’s black and white images, brim full as they are with the life of a community at work, rest and play. In one, kids eye up the local policewoman from the safety of the school gate. In another, women keep their heads down, intent on a win at the bingo. Mums with push chairs take a breather outside the Outreach Café. An instructor on a pigeon-keeping project gently places a bird into a young boy’s hands while two girls look on. The vibr

Man With a Camera   When Erskine Beveridge picked up a camera in the late 1800s, this revolutionary way of immortalising the world was perfect for documenting the Dunfermline born mill owner’s archaeological adventures across Scotland. While Beveridge’s images would go on to appear in his assorted publications, it was only when a pile of neglected glass plate photographic negatives was accidentally discovered that a vital archive of the country’s landscape on the brink of seismic social change was preserved.    The discovery occurred while surveyors from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (which later joined forces with Historic Scotland to form Historical Environment Scotland) were looking over one of Beveridge’s soon to be demolished mills in the early 1960s. A later donation of another box of glass plate negatives rescued from a skip and stored in a wardrobe for many years expanded the collection further. Several other boxes believed to have hel