September 2020 "Scotland’s absent imagery: a journey to the interior" (Prof Andrew Blaikie)

The visual frame of reference through which Scotland has been interpreted since 1800 has drawn upon rhetorics of both romanticism and modernity to produce landscapes defined in opposition: sublime Highland scenery contrasted with the urban slum. Alternatively, as with 1930s documentary, pictures denoting past rural virtues symbolise continuity with a patriotic industrial present. What is remarkable is how milieux falling outside such iconography have been erased as sites of memory. This talk considers the imagistic disregard for great swathes of country where most people lived, using ideas about ‘non-places’ and ‘edgelands’ to explain why places that were central to our geography and everyday social experience are only peripheral in our pictorial history.

Professor Andrew Blaikie, Emeritus Professor at the University of Aberdeen

Thursday 24th September, 1-2 pm

Watch a recording of this seminar here