Justified exposure for affectionate portraits

This show brings together the work of two women who had strong connections to Orkney – the experimental film-maker Margaret Tait and the photographer Gunnie Moberg. Tait’s family came from the islands but she spent her school days in Edinburgh, where she based herself after completing medical studies. Moberg, originally from Gothenburg, eventually settled in the islands with her husband, the artist Tam MacPhail, whom she had met in Jim Haynes’ Paperback Bookshop in the Sixties.

Tait’s work might best be described as a sub-genre of film-making, the film-poem, moved by Federico García Lorca’s notion of “stalking the image”. Her work was impressionistic, non-linear, with disrupted narratives, non-synchronous audio, and was interspersed with biographical and auto-biographical elements. Tait, also a prolific poet and writer, once wrote: “I don’t have to know what it’s all about. / That’s not what I’m trying to know. / It’s the looking that matters, / The being prepared to see what there is to see. / Staring has to be done: / That I must do.”

Tait worked from a studio in Edinburgh’s Rose Street where, in 1956, she made an affectionate portrait of the people who lived there, when the city centre was a vibrant community — almost all human life is here, glimpsed in lyrical fragments from pavements, interiors and the high windows of Ancona Films.

There’s a moving portrait of the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, filmed in the pubs around Rose Street and at his home near Biggar. Perhaps Tait’s most personal work here is a portrait of her mother, filmed in Orkney, entitled Ga.

Moberg was one of the few photographers to capture Tait in anything like a characteristic pose. Tait looks directly at the camera, shy and hidden. But it’s a tribute to Moberg’s gentle, winning personality that she was able to get so close.

Many of the portraits here are of writers, musicians and other creative souls. Seamus Heaney, Maya Angelou, Angela Carter, Duncan McLean and Irvine Welsh, among others, are seen intimately and affectionately through Moberg’s particular lens. Both artists deserve better exposure and this rich collection is a timely reminder of why such recognition is so justified.