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The Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) is Scotland’s oldest surviving artist-run institution. Since 1826, more than 500 artists and architects have been elected by their peers as Academicians, making them central figures in the development of Scottish art over the past two centuries.
Without the early recognition of photography’s artistic potential by founding Academician David Octavius Hill and his peers at the RSA, the course of photography in Scotland might have been very different. Their support helped establish photography’s distinctive position within Scottish art and the modern Academy.
Among current Royal Scottish Academicians, photography is not a single discipline but a field of enquiry, encompassing documentary observation, staged image-making, performance, landscape, environment, memory and experimentation. Some artists, including Calum Colvin, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Wendy McMurdo and Norman McBeath, specialise in photography as their primary mode of expression, while others employ it alongside painting, printmaking or sculpture. For artists such as Julie Brook and the collaborative partnership Dalziel + Scullion, photography forms part of a broader multi-media practice.
Many of the photographs displayed here are from the RSA’s Diploma Collection of works deposited by Academicians following their election. With others direct from artists’ studios, they demonstrate that photography is a vital and evolving art form in Scotland, with a rich diversity of practices at the heart of the nation’s leading artist-run institution.
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Thomas Joshua Cooper RSA
b.1946Thomas Joshua Cooper was born in San Francisco and is one of the most celebrated and distinctive landscape photographers working anywhere in the world today. In 1982 Cooper was appointed Head of the Photography Department at Glasgow School of Art and founded its Fine Art Photography Degree course, the first of its kind in Europe. He uses a large format camera that dates from 1898 and only ever makes one exposure at a given site, before developing the negative and printing by hand in his darkroom. In 2007 he became the first professional photographer to be elected to the Royal Scottish Academy.
These images are from Cooper’s Scattered Waters series, which documented the rivers of Scotland at source, stream and river. Cooper’s work flows through ‘projects’, many of which are composed over long periods. Beginning in 1984, Cooper sees Scattered Waters as the formative exploration that truly connected him to his adopted country.
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Derrick Guild RSA
b.1963Derrick Guild was born in Perth and studied Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee. Guild was elected to the RSA in 2010 and currently teaches at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen.
Guild’s paintings and objects reference the European still life paintings of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. The drama, allegory and naturalism inherent in this period of painting speak to Guild of ever-present dilemmas of the human condition. His works are classical, formal and at the same time contemporary in their sense of dislocation and ambiguity.
Follower documents Guild’s performance at the 2016 RSA Annual Exhibition, where he painted decorative patterns onto tulips in front of a group of his tulip paintings. In the work Guild plays the role of a Follower of the Dutch Golden Age artists, when Tulip Mania led to the flowers selling for the equivalent of ten times the annual income of a skilled craftsman.
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Leena Nammari RSA
b.1970Leena Nammari is a master printmaker based in Scotland. Her work has been exhibited in Scotland, Europe, Palestine and Australia. Nammari was elected to the RSA in 2020.
Nammari’s Palestinian heritage is key to her work, subtly loaded with the politics of the many, but always reflecting the personal. Her images have something amiss in them, a sadness, a tangible nostalgia, an abandonment and a loss, moving the viewer to pause and reflect. Nammari is focused on socially and politically engaged printmaking and teaching of photography, often to marginalised groups.
A rundown village square. It could be anywhere, but it is there. It is here.
A view I watched, observed and photographed for years. Ein Qinya village, on the outskirts of Ramallah: “The spring of the Eucalyptus” village.
But the village is struggling to cling on. It cannot expand, the buildings cannot be renovated, or preserved, as its in Area C, under Israeli control. Any new building can be demolished. No permits are passed or allowed by the military authorities, so the village crumbles.
And I take its portrait every now and again, and tell its story, hoping it won’t be the last.
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Philip Braham RSA
b.1959The paintings and photographs of Philip Braham extend the Northern Romantic tradition in which landscapes act as a metaphor for the human condition. Recent projects reflect on the temporal nature of our fragile existence set against the slower rhythms of nature.
A graduate from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, in 1980 he went to the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Holland and returned to teach at DJCAD, recently as Programme Director for Art and Philosophy.
Braham has received numerous awards, and his artworks are held in public, corporate and private collections worldwide. He was elected to the RSA in 2021.
In 2002, Braham purchased a 6x9 cm Fujifilm camera to make large scale prints of landscapes illuminated by using the full moon to reflect sunlight onto the land at night. The images captured events in real time, but the long exposures also captured deep time through the varying colours of the star trails. The series was titled Different Histories of Light.
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Julie Brook RSA (Elect)
b.1961Julie Brook is a British artist based in northwest Scotland whose sculptural practice is rooted in direct engagement with the landscape. Working in remote environments – from the deserts of Libya, Syria, Namibia and Nepal to Scottish isles and quarries in Japan and Italy – she creates temporary and permanent works that respond to the unique qualities of each place.
Brook’s sculptures explore the elemental forces that shape our world, including light, darkness, tides, gravity and time. Drawing, painting and photography form an integral part of her practice, documenting and extending these site-specific encounters for audiences through exhibitions and workshops.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, with major solo exhibitions in the UK and Japan, and recent public commissions including Tide Line in 2025 on the Fife coastline. Brook continues to develop ambitious sculptural and collaborative projects that deepen our understanding of the relationship between people and the natural world.
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Rachel Maclean RSA (Elect)
b.1987Rachel Maclean is a Glasgow-based multi-media artist whose practice includes film, sculpture, printmaking and photography. Using green-screen technology, computer animation and AI, she creates vivid, hyper-real fantasy worlds populated by extravagant characters – often performed by Maclean herself. Blending comedy with horror, her satirical works critically explore politics, identity, class and gender.
Since graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 2009, Maclean has become one of the UK’s most distinctive contemporary artists. She has exhibited internationally, with major solo exhibitions in the United States, Australia, England, Ireland, Germany and Scotland. She also represented Scotland and Venice at the Venice Biennale of 2017 with her work Spite your Face.
Maclean was elected to the RSA in 2019. The photographs on display here were made in the run-up to the Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014. Her satires of Scottish identity are just as relevant today as conversations around independence continue.
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Dalziel and Scullion
Matthew Dalziel and Louise Scullion are Scottish-based artists working with sculpture, photography, video and sound, exploring new ways to engage with the subjects of the environment and ecology.
Dalziel + Scullion studied in Dundee and Glasgow and formed their unique practice after meeting at a particularly energetic period in history of Glasgow School of Art. They have widely exhibited, nationally and internationally and have been awarded numerous awards and prizes. In 2012 they became the first artist partnership to be elected to the RSA.
'We endeavour to create artworks that embody ideas and values. We make works that reflect on climate change, that draw attention to the restorative powers of the natural world for health and wellbeing, or our relationships with birds, plants, animals, and the importance of weather. Artworks can enable or facilitate a tuning into nature’s rhythms and textures, sensually reconnecting the human body to the elemental earth.
'Spanning mythology, biology and fiction, peatly landscapes often teem with contrasts. It is a state of balance and slow constant changes. Neither solid earth nor flowing water, where the sky merges with the land in its watery reflections. It is a place of vast mossy darkness and of minute jewel-like details. The keeper of preserved bodies or ancient artefacts and a repository of folk lore... wandering sparks of light seen in boggy areas - the result of spontaneous combustion of gas from decomposing plants - but also a lure to unsuspecting observers. In this series of works, the shape shifting landscape of the peatland has been explored and found to be both water-logged and desert-like, empty and populated - a strange locality of divergence and conformity.'
- Dalziel + Scullion May 2026
Room 1: Royal Scottish Academicians
Current viewing_room
