'Early Twentieth Century Women Photographers and Filmmakers in Scotland: Violet Banks' exhibit

This artefact was exhibited in the group research exhibition 'Practicing Landscape: Land, Histories and Transformation', which ran at The Lighthouse, Glasgow, 25 Jan - 22 Mar 2020. This artefact sits within ongoing research where the main aim is to show the breadth of documentary-focused work made by early twentieth century women photographers and filmmakers in Scotland. The artefact is a prototype, the first iteration of how to exhibit the work of one of the thirteen women I am researching. The prototype enables findings that will build towards a survey exhibition at City Art Centre, Edinburgh, in early 2022, as well as opening up new lines of enquiry for written work. From the thirteen women I am researching, the artefact focuses on Edinburgh photographer Violet Banks (1886-1985). Veronica Fraser, an archivist at Royal Commission on the Ancient & Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) wrote about Banks’ life in ‘Vernacular Buildings’ (P67-78, ‘Vernacular Building 32’, Scottish Vernacular Buildings Working Group 2008-2009, ISSN:0267-3088): ‘Violet Banks (1886-1985) was born near Kinghorn, Fife and educated at Craigmont, Edinburgh, and at ECA (Edinburgh College of Art). In 1927 she was senior arts mistress at St. Oran’s, a private school at Drummond Place, Edinburgh’. Banks’ photographs of the Hebrides were the result of a tour she made during the late 1920s / early 1930s. In 1935, Violet Banks established her own commercial photography studio in Edinburgh, going on to take numerous photographs of Scotland’s capital city. In 'Practicing Landscape: Land, Histories and Transformation', I presented eight original photograph postcards that Banks’ produced, as well as one brochure entitled ‘A Day in Edinburgh’ (1934, Grant & Murray). I collected these items via separate eBay purchases, an action mirroring the precarity of women’s work in archives and the distributed nature of the multiple places their work can reside. Indeed, Banks’ own photography of the Highlands and Islands only came to light when discovered by John Dixon of Georgian Antiques, in a drawer in a sideboard that had been part of a furniture purchase and then gifted to Royal Commission for the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) to become The Violet Banks Collection. The artefact as a display, allowed a way to bring together for the first time in a grouping, a small, growing body of her work. It also, as the photographs are objects, gives the opportunity to show how Banks distributed her photographic images by means of postcard and publication. Out of the thirteen women, Banks' is one of three who utilised postcards as a means to sell their images - IF Grant and Christina Broom also did this. I happened upon Banks' work by chance, in the form of two photocopies of her postcards, which I found in the Eigg Historic Society archive, whilst researching another of the photographers, MEM Donaldson. I have been unable to track the original postcards, but this initial discovery sparked the idea to search eBay to form the small collection on show.