"Much more than a coffee table collection of Victorian postcards," - Royal Photographic Society Journal
Valentine and Sons of Dundee were Scotland’s most successful commercial photographers. In 1907, at the height of the postcard revolution, the photographs they published showed Scotland in its many guises, and were bought with pride and pleasure by Scots and visitors alike. The photographs ranged from the Bens and Glens to towns and great cities, featuring fishermen, steamers on the loch, municipal fountains and market squares. Valentine not only worked in the tradition of Scottish photographers like Washington Wilson, and Hill and Adamson, but also followed earlier engravers and landscape painters like J. M. W. Turner.
Three hundred years after the Act of Union, the pictures of 1907 showed a confident Scotland, and were sent all over the world as postcards. R. J. Morris has collected together the best of these photographs in Scotland 1907. Drawing on guidebooks, pictures, gazetteers and maps, he provides detailed explanatory commentary to elucidate this fascinating collection of images, giving a valuable insight into the history of our nation.
R. J. Morris is professor of Economic and Social History at Edinburgh University. He has spent all his life in Scotland and written extensively about towns and civil society – key aspects of Scotland’s history. He has walked his camera around urban and rural Scotland and is currently planting an apple orchard in Berwickshire.
View cart
