Fascinating insight into face of photo portraiture

This meticulously crafted and presented show of predominantly black-and-white analogue photography by the eminent Scottish photographer Robin Gillanders gives a brief insight into a career spanning four decades. Although it is not an
in-depth retrospective, it gives some notion of his concerns: a fascination with the human face, an examination of the meaning of portraiture, as well as collaborations and connections with other artists.

Gillanders’ work is underpinned by a deep poeticism, underlined by the way he uses the camera to capture impressions and fragments of time which he imbues with a significance that extends well beyond the moment. Perhaps this is why he has been drawn to the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, a kindred spirit in many respects.

Gillanders’ many projects with and about Finlay extend the latter’s range, opening up new possibilities. Finlay had a well-known fascination for sailing boats and here Gillanders captures some of the artist’s hand-made vessels, either “at home” on his mantelshelf, or sailing in the small loch at Finlay’s sculpture garden, Little Sparta. Two sets of images face each other at the entrance to this show. On one side there is a collection of male heads, contemporaries of Gillanders, and on the other, three portraits of younger, less well-known female artists — the writer Kathleen Jamie, visual artist Hanna Tuulikki and singer-songwriter Karine Polwart.

These sets of images could hardly be more different in their content and approach. Each woman was asked to bring a significant object to accompany the portrait and all were photographed in a set in Gillanders’ studio, comprising a table and grey background. The prints are large-format coloured giclée. In one, Tuulikki listens intently to a tuning fork while Polwart chooses heather and bog-cotton as her creative talisman. The male heads, which Gillanders calls a series of “studies” rather than portraiture, present a starker, monochrome vision.

Gillanders worked with the writer Henry Gough-Cooper on a photographic “haiku” reinterpretation of Roland Barthes’ collection of essay fragments, A Lover’s Discourse, transforming this under the title
A Lover’s Complaint.

A less obscure and more accessible project is the series The Philosopher’s Garden — a tribute, shot in Ermenonville in France, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his final work, The Reveries of a Solitary Walker.

Until January 14