Edinburgh: An Architectural Portrait
Photography by James Reid
Edinburgh: An Architectural Portrait features an inspiring portfolio of imagery created over a ten-year period by the photographer and visual artist James Reid. Documenting the City of Edinburgh using digital, analogue and polaroid formats, the book captures the city’s main conservation areas, with an emphasis on key architects, listed buildings and distinct aspects of the cityscape.
Presented as a beautiful collection of black-and-white images, along with a handful of colour works, the book’s digital images are a mixture of full-frame capture and large-scale composite pieces, along with a selection of 35mm analogue single-frame photography. These include panoramic views as well as more intimate perspectives, made possible by Reid’s unique access to the city’s various buildings and structures of note.
The book also features essays by five established Edinburgh-based artists – Aly Gordon (painter), Bruce Hare (artist and architect), Marianne Magnin (artist and curator), Merlin Ramos (painter) and Henry Stevens (artist and architect) – each of whom offers a personally informed response to the city and how its architecture, art and history inform, influence and impact on them.
The resulting publication is a unique visual mapping of the city’s most architecturally significant areas that will appeal to not only architects, artists and academics, but also residence of and visitors to one of the world’s most architecturally rich capitals of culture.
James Reid is an Edinburgh-based visual artist who has established his own distinct style using a range of photographic media (digital, analogue and polaroid), along with printing, drawing and airbrush techniques, to produce traditional and experimental works around the world. Reid received his MA in Fine Art Photography from De Montfort University in Leicester. His art practice is founded on the natural and built environment, and has evolved to include the capturing of large-scale architecture and structures, both during construction and upon completion. Recent projects include the book 70 St Mary Axe (Artifice Press, 2020), which features Reid’s detailed visual record of the major central London development of the same name, from concept through to completion.
