A magical collection of images that captures the essence of the beautiful and timeless world of the Hebrides.
Gus Wylie is acclaimed as a leading exponent of monochrome photography and his two previous books on the Hebrides have made him in the opinion of many observers ’the best modern photographer of the Western Isles’.
This collection features Wylie’s one venture into colour photography in that region, taken more than two decades ago, and testifies both to his qualities as a photographer and to the timeless beauty of the Hebrides. The images in Hebridean Light lyrically explore the possibilities that colour affords: a sense of time and of place; the extraordinary quality of translucent water upon the whiteness of unpolluted sands; the visual metaphors of a breaking wave beside a lamb’s fleece or salmon scales juxtaposed with rippling water.
And if nature is celebrated, so too is a sense of the human: in the humanity of the photographer and the humanity of the subjects seen through his lens. The result is a magical collection of images that captures the essence of a beautiful and timeless world.
Gus Wylie trained as a fine artist and gradated from the School of Painting of the Royal College of Art in 1960. He taught Fine Art and Photography for several years and in 1981 he received the Observer Award for documentary photography for his ‘Ted’s, Rockers, and Bikers’ series. Whilst teaching at the Royal College of Art in 1990 he was awarded a PhD in Cultural History, and is currently teaching at the University of the Arts, London.