Werner Kissling came to Britain in 1931 in a diplomatic capacity, only to leave the service in order to pursue studies in ethnology, which he maintained for the rest of his life. He first visited the Western Isles in the early 1930s to make the first ever moving picture to use spoken Gaelic. This film, A Poem of Remote Lives, was filmed on Eriskay, and aroused considerable interest at the time, though afterwards it lay forgotten in the archives of the School of Scottish Studies until the late 1970s. Kissling returned to Eriskay and South Uist almost every year until the war, taking hundreds of photographs, particularly of people involved in traditional crafts, and making his work a valuable human record of a way of life now forever vanished. As a German national living in Britain, Kissling was interned at the start of the war (though released in 1942) and was unable to return to the Hebrides (at that time a restricted area) until 1947. From then on he visited regularly, as well as travelling as far afield as America and New Zealand in pursuit of his ethnological and photographic interests.
This book includes over a hundred of Kissling’s Hebridean photographs published in book form for the first time. It represents the full range of his technical and artistic skill, and, together with a detailed biographical essay and informed appreciation of his photography, it is a magnificent celebration of this talented yet underrated man. Together with the work of Margaret Fay Shaw and Paul Strand, Kissling’s photography is an evocative record of the very last moments of an age-old way of life. |
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