candid cameras

An epidemic in Scotland during the 1840s saw the birth of the photo-journalist. Now a major new documentary explores how the genre has developed over the years. Eddie Gibb reports

IN THE 1840s, Edinburgh was in the grip of a typhoid and cholera epidemic but even so the industrial revolution meant thousands of people kept pouring into the city in search of work. With a story like that, the media of today would quickly follow up with gritty front-cover splashes of the dirt-poor in their slum dwellings. David Octavious Hill and Robert Adamson, the pioneering Edinburgh photographers who invented the photo-essay, took a different approach.

Instead of documenting the squalor of Edinburgh, Hill and Adamson transported their bulky camera equipment down to the Forth, where the thriving fishing village of Newhaven offered healthier subjects for their portraits of working life. The result was an extraordinary series of photographs called the Fishermen and Women of the Firth of Forth, which were intended to promote the benefits of community life. "I think they were presenting this as a model," says Sara Stevenson, curator of a new Edinburgh-based exhibition called the Art Of Documentary.

Hill and Adamson's Newhaven series were not published during their lifetime, but the collection of around 130 "calotype" pictures is now acknowledged as the start of the genre that became photojournalism. The Art Of Documentary makes a big point of claiming the credit for Scotland by including several of their pictures, before fast- forwarding into the photographic century.

The fact that photojournalism began here came as a result of Edinburgh's key role in the Enlightment, which had sparked an interest in the individual. "They were celebrating the heroism of a group of working people," says Stevenson. "As a painter, Hill believed that art should be morally uplifting."

However, it was not until the 1930s when magazines such as the Picture Post and its American equivalent, Life, created a mass market for documentary photographs that the genre really took off. By then, Scotland was providing a very different type of story from Hill and Adamson's wholesome fishwives. If it wasn't the Highlands then it was often the squalor of the inner cities that Hill and Adamson had studiously avoided. This is how the Gorbals became a by-word for inner city decay in Britain.

Humphrey Spender travelled to Glasgow shortly before the second world war to produce a series of photographs of shipyard workers and women in the steamie which were published in the newly launched Picture Post in 1939. Spender was followed a few years later by Bert Hardy whose photos of Glasgow for the same magazine became iconic, particularly the image of two tousle-haired urchins grinning into the lens.

These were defining images of Glasgow, but they had as much to do with the Picture Post's determination to increase its circulation in Scotland, as the desire to document a social scene. Having invented photojournalism, Scots became the subject of a number of famous essays.

What is noticeable about the pictures selected for the Art Of Documentary is that many are taken with an outsider's eye. Wolfgang Suschitsky was a Jewish refugee from Austria who fled to London in 1935, and came to Dundee towards the end of the war to produce a powerful photo-essay. He was also involved in a documentary film about the children's panels in Scotland.

THIS was not the only link between still and moving documentary images, however. Probably the best known Scottish documentarist is Oscar Marzaroli, who came to Scotland with his parents in 1933 aged two. Throughout his adult life until his death in 1989, Marzaroli photographed the changing Glasgow as the city centre slums were cleared and their inhabitants moved to peripheral housing schemes.

But he also made films during a golden age of Scottish documentaries. Although it would be incorrect to claim that a Scot invented the genre, in the same way as Hill and Adamson were founding fathers of the photo-essay, it is widely believed that the documentary is Scotland's biggest contribution to film.

As Kevin Macdonald celebrates his Oscar for One Day In September, a film about the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, it is worth remembering John Grierson, the Kilmarnock-born film-maker who is now regarded as the father of British documentaries. His film, Seawards The Great Ships, on which Marzaroli worked as a camera operator, won an Oscar some 40 years before Macdonald.

"Documentaries are the one area where you can identify an indigenous sector," says Duncan Petrie, whose forthcoming book Screening Scotland contains a chapter on the Scottish documentary. "It kept film-making alive in Scotland at a time when most other forms took place in Scotland."

There was a touch of the Hill and Adamson in Grierson's approach, which focused on the everyday heroism of ordinary working people. "He established the documentary as an educational medium, with the idea of forging a national community which tended to be quite paternalistic," adds Petrie. "It was about instructing people how to be good citizens."

While photography from - and about - Scotland boomed as a result of huge circulation magazines such as Picture Post, documentary films were made for rather more unorthodox commercial reasons. Essentially a lot of films got made as a result of the corporate equivalent of vanity publishing.

Big firms and august institutions hired directors such as Grierson and Marzaroli to flatter their importance, resulting in titles such as Rivers At Work for the hydro board and The Invergordon Smelter for the British Aluminium Company. The Highlands got this treatment on behalf of tourist boards while all the Scottish new towns were celebrated in their modernist glory.

Films of Scotland was set up as a committee to channel sponsorship money into film-making for nearly three decades until it was wound up in the early 1980s. This was how film-makers such as Bill Forsyth and Murray Grigor first cut their teeth. "Their remit was very broad - to make good films about Scotland," says Janet McBain, curator of the Scottish Film Archive. "There is a history of documentary in Scotland and it's the thing that's recognised as our contribution to world cinema."

Stevenson at the portrait gallery in Edinburgh is equally convinced that Hill and Adamson secured Scotland's place in the history books as the birthplace of photo-journalism. "I think being interested in people and humanity is not exclusively Scottish but it is a Scottish thing," she says.

The Art Of Documentary is at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, 26 May-3 June. One Day in September is released on June 9

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