Scottish Women Photographers and the Everyday

I was one of three speakers that was invited by Sarah Neely to contribute to the Margaret Tait 100 event ‘The everyday type of thing’: symposium on the work of women photographers’. Speakers: Laura Guy (Newcastle University), Jenny Brownrigg (Glasgow School of Art), and Sarah Neely (University of Glasgow). Keynote: Professor Annette Kuhn (Professor and Research Fellow in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London). The symposium, which examined the work of women photographers, is part of a year-long wider programme in celebration of the centenary of Scottish film-maker Margaret Tait (1918-1999). Taking Tait’s description of her approach to photographing her subjects as a starting point, the symposium reflected on the use of everyday subjects in the work of women photographers, considering topics such as the politics and aesthetics of the everyday, feminist practices, and tensions between amateur and professional approaches. My 20 minute paper focused on interpreting the symposium theme of the ‘everyday’ in Margaret Fay Shaw (1903-2004)’s photographs, covering the period 1929-35, when she lived for six years with the sisters Mairi and Peigi MacRae in North Glendale, South Uist. Like Tait, Shaw achieved an intimacy through detail and familiarity, in an unfolding portrait of the sisters’ lives and that of their neighbours and friends. The paper argued that the ‘everyday’ is an accumulation. In thinking of the title ‘Subjects and Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader’, (Todd, P, Benjamin, B, Lux, 2004), I sought for the first time to establish a ‘sequence’ of shots within Shaw’s archive, to see what reading a sequence can lend, or undermine, positing that a pitfall of the researcher is to fall under the allure of a singular image and its ‘authenticity’ of the everyday. A further research method I have developed is to identify photographs from different archives of the same island marker or islander subject. This allows for a comparison and analysis of the differences in composition, focus and position of the photographer. I call this ‘the overlap’. I gave two examples in the paper. The first was of two South Uist islanders, Miss Mary Smith and Angus John Campbell, firstly in a 1935 portrait by Werner Kissling; then captured in a series of portraits by Shaw over the time she stayed on South Uist. For Shaw, the paper argued that the two islanders are more than just ethnographic ‘type’. The paper looked at the ways Shaw insured it was no ‘Brigadoon’ version of remote islander life that she promoted in her work, by her methods of study and understanding of their everyday. The second example was Eigg islander Isobel MacQuarrie, both through photographs by Mary Ethel Muir Donaldson, and also, in finding MacQuarrie in portraits taken by her own family (from Eigg Historic Society archive of islanders’ photographic collections). This development allowed the opportunity to see the differences when islanders photographed islanders. The paper concluded by looked at the question regarding who is doing the interpreting of the everyday - the subject, photographer or researcher - and from what position- namely gender and class.