‘Morning mist, 2019’ by Omar Shamma
“Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig.” These few words from the poem Hallaig by Sorley MacLean evoke a land that remembers.
The village of Hallaig on the Hebridean island of Raasay might have been cleared, its homes gone, but the memory of its people endures in the birch woods, streams and quiet traces of life.
The project From Land, organised by the RPS Scotland Group, is an attempt to see and listen to that testimony, to recognise how the nation’s landscapes hold human presence even in absence. Each photograph becomes a gesture of attention: to the rhythms of life, to the traces left behind, and to the subtle ways that land shapes identity and belonging.
From Land is a year-long photographic exploration that will culminate in a collective photobook. It invites Scotland-based members of the RPS to contribute to a growing archive of images reflecting environmental, social and cultural histories, adding to an ongoing dialogue between people and the landscapes they inhabit.
Land is never only scenery. It is workplace and memory, shelter and resource, identity and inheritance. It shapes communities, economies, traditions and futures. Equally, human presence reshapes land through cultivation, industry, housing, conservation, neglect, celebration and struggle.
Through From Land, I am interested in photographs that reflect these entangled relationships, revealing how place is lived, shared, worked, contested, protected and cherished.
The project welcomes contributions across all photographic genres – landscape, portraiture, documentary, street, urban, experimental and nature. Some photographs might dwell on Scotland’s dramatic topographies, others on quiet gestures of daily life, fragile ecologies, or traces of human intervention. Together, these varied perspectives will map experience, memory, labour and belonging as well as geography.
Over the coming year, participants are encouraged to respond to the land through the changing seasons. By photographing people, wildlife, industry, infrastructure and environment, we hope to capture rhythms and cycles – shifts in light and weather, growth and decay, renewal and erosion, presence and absence. These temporal threads will give the project both documentary weight and poetic resonance.
The resulting photobook will assemble many viewpoints in a shared visual conversation. It will become an archive of how Scotland’s land is seen, felt, used and imagined today. From Land becomes both record and reflection – a testament to enduring ties between land, life and time, and a reminder of what is at stake in how we choose to live with the ground beneath us.
‘Lunan Bay, 2023' from the series Gash by John Post
Alongside the project team I serve on the panel guiding the development of the final publication, supporting image selection, sequencing and critical framing. I am a photographer, researcher and educator whose work explores photography’s role in shaping identity, memory and lived experience, often through participatory approaches.
My work has been exhibited across the UK, and I recently completed a PhD in Art and Design at Ulster University. From Land reflects my commitment to collaborative image-making and to building visual archives that foreground collective narratives, offering photography not only as a means of representation but as a way of thinking with – and about – the places we inhabit.
I am joined on the panel by selectors whose expertise helps shape this developing photobook into something truly special.
Trevor E R Yerbury FRPS is a fourth-generation photographer from Edinburgh, continuing a family business founded in 1864. His portrait work has been exhibited internationally and commissioned for major collections. His practice combines classic portraiture with a passion for historic photographic printing processes, particularly platinum and palladium printing.
Shahbaz Majeed is an award-winning, Dundee-based landscape and aerial photographer, and a presenter on the BBC Scotland programme Landward. He has won numerous awards over the years with his images, and his work is featured on UK banknotes.
The project is steered by Samantha Dearlove, a member of the RPS Scotland Events Committee, whose guidance ensures the book develops as a creative collaboration as well as an enduring record of Scotland and the land that sustains it.
More information on the From Land project can be found on the RPS Scotland Group site.