Room 2: The Morton Award for Lens-based Media

The Morton Award for Lens-based Media occupies a vital place in contemporary Scottish photography. Administered by the Royal Scottish Academy and funded by The Morton Charitable Trust from 2006 to 2023, the £ 5,000 award enabled artists working with photography and film to research, develop and produce ambitious new work. Like many RSA awards, its value lay in financial support, affording artistic freedom and creating space for artists to critically develop practice through their own lens.

For emerging photographic artists, the award has helped bridge early practice with wider public recognition. The opportunity to exhibit work at the RSA galleries, and to have pieces acquired for the RSA collections, placed contemporary lens-based practice within a national artistic record. In doing so, the Morton Award has helped ensure that new voices and technologies have become an integral part of Scotland’s evolving art history.

Every photographic winner of the award is represented here, showing the culturally diverse nature of current Scottish practice. Following the death of Elizabeth Lornie in 2024, the Morton Award briefly became the RSA Lens-based Media Award before becoming the RSA Elizabeth Lornie Photography Award in 2025. Lornie’s legacy to Scottish photography cannot be overstated and the continuation of the award helps secure the future of the medium for coming generations.
Artworks
Philip Braham RSA
b.1959
The 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.
Artworks
Rory Donaldson
b.1965
Born in Edinburgh and based in New York, Rory Donaldson’s practice explores the relationship between photography and painting. He graduated from Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen and the University of Ulster in Belfast. Donaldson won the RSA Morton Award in 2008.

His SQCITY series examines overlooked spaces within the urban landscape. It contains photographed doorways, architectural frames, street grids, and subway platforms. Through digital manipulation, these images are stretched and transformed into compositions that resemble abstract paintings, blurring the boundaries with photography.

By reimagining familiar city spaces as fields of colour, texture and form, Donaldson invites viewers to look again at the structures that shape everyday experience. His work reveals the poetic and abstract qualities hidden within the architecture of the modern city, challenging conventional perceptions of both photography and place.
Gair Dunlop
b.1960
- Gair Dunlop
  Iradiated Fuel Caves, Dounreay, 2016
  c-type digital print on acrylic
  40.0 x 53.0cm
- Gair Dunlop
  Iradiated Fuel Caves, Dounreay, 2016
  c-type digital print on acrylic
  40.0 x 53.0cm
Gair Dunlop studied photography at the Polytechnic of Central London before completing an MSc in Electronic Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee. His projects have been exhibited and received recognition internationally.

Dunlop is an artist, researcher and senior lecturer in Contemporary Art at the University of Dundee. His interdisciplinary practice combines film, photography, archives and publication. His work explores the intersection of art, science and the environment, often developed through long-term collaborations with researchers and local communities. Dunlop works with landscapes shaped by environmental and technological change and investigates their consequences on physical space and imagination.

Dunlop won the RSA Morton Award in 2015 and used it to explore and document UK nuclear sites. These eerily beautiful images are of the irradiated fuel caves at Dounreay Nuclear facility in Caithness.
Paul Duke
b.1965
Paul Duke is a photographer who explores memory, identity and place through long-term documentary projects rooted in Scotland. Born and educated in Edinburgh, he studied photography at Napier University before completing a Masters at the Royal College of Art. After living and working in Italy, he returned to the UK where he works between London and Scotland. Alongside photography practice, he teaches at several art colleges, including at Middlesex University where he became a Senior Lecturer. He exhibits widely in the UK and internationally.

A recipient of the RSA Morton Award in 2016, Duke has published two monographs: At Sea, in 2013, which comprises black and white portraits of individuals working in the fishing industry, and No Ruined Stone in 2018, containing landscapes and portraits conveying the social crisis of Edinburgh’s Muirhouse neighbourhood. His photographs balance documentary observation with personal experience, creating deeply empathetic studies of landscape, community and social history.
Daniel Cook
b.1989
Daniel Cook was born in Edinburgh and is now based in Glasgow. Winner of the RSA Morton Award in 2019, his work blurs the boundaries between documentary, performance and fiction. He immerses himself in the lives of individuals who are on the fringes of society, revealing their intimate stories that challenge conventional portrayals of contemporary Scotland. Cook's award-winning films focus on characters who live intensely in the present despite challenging circumstances.

Love Letters From Aberdeenshire emerged from two years spent on Scotland’s north-east coast, where Cook developed close relationships with the people he photographed and filmed. The project centres on individuals whose lives have been shaped by economic hardship and social isolation. However, they continue to sustain humour, resilience and connection. Their voices offer an alternative portrait of rural Scotland that celebrates the dignity and enduring spirit of its communities.
Artworks
Oana Stanciu
b.1988

A recipient of multiple international awards, including the RSA Morton Award in 2021, Oana Stanciu is a Romanian artist based in Edinburgh. Her practice spans photography, performance, sculpture and moving image.

This work is part of the Stai în banca ta project, in which she transforms everyday furniture into uncanny, animated forms that breathe, play and resist their intended purpose. The Romanian phrase Stai în banca ta – literally ‘Stay at your desk’ - is commonly used to mean ‘behave’. Stanciu draws a parallel between domestic objects and the expectations placed on women within the home. These include being dependable and self-effacing. By merging her own body with household objects, she creates surreal self-portraits that challenge these assumptions and imagine alternative identities.
Artworks
Alicia Bruce
b.1979

Alicia Bruce is a working-class photographer, educator and activist based in Edinburgh. Working between documentary and staged photography, her practice explores local and global communities, environmental issues and politics of space, territories and heritage through carefully constructed visual narratives.

She has received numerous awards and residencies, including the RSA Morton Award in 2014, which supported her in developing Sim, a project investigating the hidden world of robotic patients used in medical education and clinical training. Beginning with a residency at the Scottish Clinical Simulation Centre in Forth Valley Hospital and extending to centres across the United States and Canada, she created photographs that dissolve the boundaries between reality and fiction. Both uncanny and compelling, the resulting images offer a glimpse into a world in which technology, care and performance intersect. This photograph was purchased by the Academy to accompany her film Sim Scenario, which she deposited as part of the Morton Award.
Sekai Machache
b.1989
Sekai Machache is a Zimbabwean Scottish visual artist and curator whose practice explores identity, ancestry and the relationship between history, spirituality and imagination. Working across photography, film and performance, Machache creates symbolic images that seek to recover invisible and undocumented histories.

Partially supported by the 2020 RSA Morton Award, The Divine Sky is a multidisciplinary project inspired by the twelve stages of an ancient Indigo dyeing process developed in Mali, West Africa. Integrating photography, poetry, film and immersive storytelling, the work reflects on African metaphysics, Black Scottish identity, and the legacies of colonialism. In A Hint of Blue, Machache transforms the domestic still life into a site of ritual and reflection, exploring themes of memory, over-consumption and cultural exchanges. Through the recurring symbolism of blue, the artist created a space where personal and collective histories can be reimagined.
Aqsa Arif
b.1996
- Aqsa Arif
  The Jewels of Yesterday, 2023
  digital print on cotton satin, jacquard fabric
  120 x 81cm (total)
- Aqsa Arif
  Lost in the Promised Land, 2023
  digital print on cotton satin, jacquard fabric
  120 x 81cm (total)
Aqsa Arif is a Scottish Pakistani artist and filmmaker based in Glasgow. Working across film, printmaking, photography and poetry, she creates immersive installations that explore themes of dual heritage, migration and cultural dissonance. Drawing on folklore, mythology and cinematic language, her practice reimagines pre- and post-colonial histories through the lens of her own lived experience. She questions how identity is shaped, inherited and transformed.

Arif’s acclaimed film Spicy Pink Tea has screened at BAFTA qualifying festivals, won Best Dance Film at Aesthetica Film Festival and was nominated for the Young Scottish Filmmaker Prize at Glasgow Short Film Festival. In 2023, she received both the Platform: Early Career Artist Award and the RSA Morton Award. She used the award to explore the theme of traditional Pakistani weddings, creating semi-imagined worlds and portraits drawing on family objects and memories. The women in these photographs are Arif's mother and sister.
Artworks
Flannery O’Kafka
b.1976

Flannery O’kafka’s practice centres on photography as a means of navigating memory and identity. Working primarily with 35mm snapshot photography, she creates intuitive, deeply personal works that explore adoption, absence and the search for home. Wake Wake Island takes its title from the coded birthplace recorded on her 1976 Ohio birth index – a placeholder used to conceal the origins of children adopted out of state.

Developed through the 2022 RSA Morton Award, Wake Wake Island combines newly made photographs with rediscovered slide film from the 1960s and 1970s, creating a poetic landscape shaped by chance, loss and resilience. The book is designed in collaboration with the Royal National Institute of Blind People, featuring easy-to-read text, Braille, image descriptions and tactile photographic prints. Printed on transparent paper, each photograph is intended to be explored through touch. By placing accessibility at the centre of this work, O’kafka expands the experience of photography to multiple senses.

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