This gallery space introduces the diverse photographic practice by 19th century and contemporary photographers as part of the wider exhibition at Dalkeith Palace. It features an accessible version of Flannery O’kafka’s work Wake Wake Island that can be handled, and has step-free access, which is currently unavailable at the palace.
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Flannery O'Kafka
b. 1976Flannery O’kafka (she/they), is an artist living and working in Glasgow. Her practice centres on photography as a means of navigating memory and identity. Working mainly with 35mm snapshot photography, she creates deeply personal works that explore adoption, absence and the search for home. In 2022 she won the RSA Morton Award for Lens-based Media and used the funds to help make Wake Wake Island. This accessible book expands the experience of photography to multiple senses.
Another copy of Wake Wake Island is on display at Dalkeith Palace, which presently does not have step-free access. There are plans in place to resolve this, and hopefully the palace will be fully accessible soon.
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Alex Boyd
b. 1984Alex Boyd is a Scottish photographer, printmaker, and writer whose work explores Scotland’s landscapes and has a deep engagement with Scottish identity and environment. In 2013, Boyd’s RSA Residency at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig fed into his series The Point of The Deliverance, in which he used the antique wet-plate collodion process to chart the ancient Atlantic coastlines and mountains of Scotland and Ireland. The series is a unique visual record through the eyes of a photographer making a pilgrimage to the edges of the Celtic world.
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Dr Thomas Keith
(1827–1895)Dr. Thomas Keith was a Scottish surgeon and pioneering photographer. He practiced medicine in Edinburgh, later serving as Queen Victoria’s physician in Scotland. Between 1852 and 1857, he dedicated himself to photography, mastering the waxed paper process and capturing evocative images of Edinburgh and Scotland. Inspired by the early pioneers of photography in Scotland David Octavius Hill RSA and chemist Robert Adamson Keith’s legacy bridges medicine and art,creating a lasting photographic record of his time.
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Room 1: Royal Scottish Academicians
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... -
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... -
Room 3: The John Kinross Scholarship
Each year the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) John Kinross Scholarship provides ten final year undergraduate and postgraduate art and architecture students with the opportunity to research and develop their practice... -
Room 4: Portraits of Academicians
James Good Tunny (1820–1887) was a professional photographer who established a thriving business in Edinburgh during the 1850s. He recalled that, as a young man in the 1840s, he would... -
Room 5: Armoury
The photographs in this room are reproduced from a remarkable album in the library of the RSA. Around 1850, the British photographer Charles Clifford established a studio in Spain. His... -
Room 6: The Dawn of Photography
Scotland played a leading role in the early years of photography. When, in 1839, William Henry Fox Talbot invented the Calotype process – a method of creating a paper negative... -
Caroline Douglas
Caroline Douglas is an artist and historian of early photography . In her practice she moves across photography, writing and creative archival research to work cross-historically, re-touching the archive, to... -
Irvine & Spence
Disproportionate Impacts & Everyday Agitations This collaborative work from Irvine & Spence was the winner of the RSA Lens-Based Media Award 2024. This was an interim award between the Morton... -
Walter Dalkeith
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