Presence and Absence: 'Return to Mingulay' at the Wardlaw Museum

By Lucien Willey

Stark(‘stärk): adjective: barren, desolate, lacking in ornamentation, harsh. Of all the contents of the Oxford English Dictionary, no single word is a better description of Return to Mingulay, a recent exhibition of photography at the Wardlaw Museum which closed on 7 January of this year. Composed entirely of black and white photographs of the island of Mingulay, an island in the Outer Hebrides that has been abandoned since 1912, this exhibition was simple and uncluttered – and reveled in that.

On display was the work of three photographers: Robert Moyes Adam, who documented the island from 1905 to 1922, Margret Fay Shaw, an American photographer who documented the brief return of shepherds to Mingulay during the summers of 1930 to 1934, and previously unseen works by Craig Easton, who photographed the island in 2021 to commemorate the centenary of Adam’s final visit to Mingulay. These photos, presented in simple black frames, hung on the walls of the gallery evenly spaced and evenly lit against a grey-blue wall which served to further emphasize their tonal depth.

**Craig Easton, *Mingulay Portfolio Print 5*, 2021, platinum print, University of St Andrews Special Collections, St Andrews.**

There are only so many ways to describe the landscape of the Hebrides before you are forced to reach for your Thesaurus to make a list of synonyms for stark and majestic. Nevertheless, despite words falling somewhat short in relation to these isles, the photography of this exhibition does them justice. Perhaps part of it is located within Easton’s choice to shoot in black and white, which lent his photography a timeless quality, especially when paired with the works of Adam and Shaw. Without glancing at the labels, I believe it would be close to impossible to tell – purely from the photographs on display – if they were taken in the early twentieth century, or the twenty-first.

I found that people were rarely present in any of the three photographers’ works. If present at all, they were never in the foreground, instead standing off on a distant hillside, or wrestling an old rowing skiff off the rocks. In fact, in the majority of the exhibition’s photos, the signs of life are the omnipresent wheeling seabirds far off in the sky, as much a part of the landscape as the waves, cliffs, and the slowly crumbling stone houses that are the only evidence that this landscape was touched by human hands. Yet occasionally, a human figure takes prominence in a shot. In one of Shaw’s images, a visiting shepherd holds out a milk bottle to a lamb, presenting a touching moment of connection between humanity and nature. In another, the body of a man – his head notably cropped out of the frame – holds three cats atop a box steady for the photograph, two more felines crouching beneath.

**Margret Fay Shaw, 1930-34, silver gelatin print, Canna House Photography Collections, National Trust of Scotland.**

The history of Mingulay is one of isolation, even for the Hebrides. The second largest of an archipelago known variously as the Bishop or Barra Isles, Mingulay may have been settled as early as 871, with a small community eking out a living primarily through fishing, crafting, and the hunting of seabirds. Little changed throughout the centuries as the island passed through the hands of various owners, almost none of whom lived on it. Mingulay’s isolation shielded it from some turbulent periods of Scottish history, as the decline of Scottish Gaelic, the Protestant Reformation, or the Highland Clearances barely touched it. Eventually, people abandoned the harsh lifestyle of the islands for less strenuous and dangerous lives elsewhere, leaving Mingulay empty, with the old villages left to the unforgiving mercy of the Hebrides.

Reading into the exhibition, one of its major themes is, in some ways, absence. The absence of color in the photographs highlights the dramatic landscapes and emphasizes the timelessness of the Hebrides. In the same way, the absence of people is lightly touched upon, the island’s abandoned state seen through a distant, empty stone shepherd's hut or the ruins of what may have once been a pasture wall. Nature reclaiming what had always been a tenuous extension of civilization, the pastures and cottages crumbling back into the island.