Roger Cox: The landscape photography that properly represents Scotland

Last year, regular readers may remember, I got all excited about the newly created Scottish Landscape Photographer of the Year Awards.

'Winter's Light' - which shows Bidean Nam Bian in Glen Coe - won the individual landscape category for Jason Baxter

I wasn’t just having palpitations because I enjoy looking at great landscape photos (although I do) – what particularly floated my boat about this award was that its founder, professional photographer Stuart Low, was actively looking for pictures that broke the romantic, Land of Mountain and Flood-style mould that Scotland seems to have been stuck with since at least the middle of the 19th century. Stand-out images included David Queenan’s atmospheric but very far from stereotypical shot of Bo’ness Harbour at low tide, with the marker lights on the harbour walls reflected in the slick mudflats in the foreground, and Willem Vlotman’s stunning image of Aberdeen Lighthouse with a huge wave exploding behind it, which, in terms of style and composition, seemed to have more in common with 1930s Cartier-Bresson than 1830s Landseer. In short: here was an award that promised to show us all of Scotland, or at least a representative sample of it, rather than the same old, same old.

But what about Year Two? Faced with the inevitable barrage of photos taken in familiar locations as news of the award spread, would Low be able to stick to his original philosophy? Or would he simply be overwhelmed by thousands of technically perfect pictures of the lone tree of Lochan na h-Achlaise (the little stubby shrub-on-an-island at the southern entrance Rannoch Moor, backed by mountains, that’s featured on every Scottish-themed calendar since we went Grigorian)?

Well, the 2016 results are now in, and it’s great to see that, once again, Low’s final selection offers a wonderfully broad range of imagery. True, the majestic mountain vistas of the Highlands are well-represented, not least among the main award-winners, but the angles chosen still tend to be novel, and in terms of subject matter there’s clearly still plenty of room for the quirky, the unusual and the otherwise completely anonymous. Commended in the seascape category, Kevin Roberts’ night-time shot of St Abbs Lighthouse, with the aurora visible out to sea and star trails criss-crossing the sky above, takes what is a pretty unremarkable building by day and turns it into the centrepiece of an astounding celestial light show. Also commended is Tomasz Szatewicz’s picture of a half-sunken old boat at Inchnacardoch Bay, Loch Ness, photographed just after sunrise – something sad and forgotten briefly transformed into something mysterious and magical.

Why does it matter that Low continues to offer this forum for unfamiliar views of Scotland? Well, perhaps because a nation’s sense of itself is more closely bound up with the way it imagines its landscape than most of us realise. Perhaps because a Scotland that can only conceive of itself as a land of craggy mountains and chilly lochs might have a correspondingly narrow view of what it means to be Scottish, whereas a Scotland that can accept the inherent Scottishness of Central Belt mudflats and east coast lighthouses might be a smidge more accepting of difference.

And then there’s the parallel argument – previously made by this newspaper’s art critic Duncan Macmillan in reference to the way we display our most significant art treasures in the National Gallery – that if Scotland doesn’t tell its own story, other people will tell it for us.

As if to prove the point, I recently received a copy of the Outdoor Photographer of the Year book, featuring some of the best entries in the competition of the same name, organised by the East Sussex-based Outdoor Photographer magazine. Scotland features fairly prominently, with a total of ten images in just over 200 pages (the same number, incidentally, as Iceland). One of the pictures is a still life, but the others are all either landscapes or seascapes. The images are all very beautiful, but only two of them originated south of the Highland Line. Of the rest, the majority depict either mountains, mountains and lochs or mountains and sea. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, of course – it can, after all, be instructive to see ourselves as others see us. But that doesn’t necessarily have to be the way we see ourselves.

• The Scottish Landscape Photographer of the Year exhibition will be at Ocean Terminal, Edinburgh, 18 July until 31 August, and at FifeSpace, Rothes Halls, Glenrothes, from 17 September until 4 November. For more information, or to order a copy of the SLPOTY book, visit www.slpoty.co.uk. To order a copy of the Outdoor Photographer of the Year book, visit www.opoty.co.uk