The dreaded super flu struck this month and took me out for a whole week. In between bouts of feeling sorry for myself, I made the most of our new Highland Broadband connection and went researching old photographers. I’d researched the first British landscape photographers a while back and found George Washington Wilson (along with Roger Fenton and Francis Bedford). I originally saw his work when we launched On Landscape in the National Media Museum.

I was really happy to find that in the intervening years, Aberdeen University Library had made high resolution scans and so I spent quite a while collecting a range of pictures from the Glencoe area.

The images were all ‘uncleaned’ and some had quite bad marks. But with a bit of work retouching, they looked amazing. I’d recently bought a digital picture frame for my parents and had used AI to clean up and re-colour some faded transparency scans. Whilst the results needed some work (blending with the original in some cases), the results were really engaging. On a whim I uploaded one of the Wilson photos of a couple of landmark locations and the results surprised me. Even though I’m used to the differences between black and white and colour, seeing these old photos with a contemporary colour look definitely triggered a response, an immediacy that I couldn’t really explain - especially for an image taken nearly 170 years ago!

I tried posting a few to friends and on Facebook and it wasn’t just me. I’m going to put some of these into an article and possibly I’ll look at trying a rephotography project with them (rather like Mark Klett’s work in the US). In the meantime, here’s a sample of the Clachaig Inn near Glencoe, a place I’m sure many landscape photographers have stopped for refreshments!

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