“George Washington Wilson is known for his Highland travel photographs and mementoes of Scottish excursions. His training as an artist informed the composition of his landscapes in the new medium of photography. While drawings and engravings illustrated the early nineteenth century travel guides to Scotland and provided regular income for Scottish landscape painters photographs were to replace them from the middle of the century. Wilson was a leader in developing this new form, his skill not only in replicating in liquid black and white chemicals the oil and pigment glazes or watercolour washes of paintings but exploring the possibilities of this new media and at an affordable price. In ‘The Salmon Leap, on the Tilt, Blair Atholl’ or ‘Birnam Falls, Dunkeld’ c.1860 Wilson structures the images as an artist would.
In ‘Birnam Falls’ at the top of the photograph a Highland cascade pours from a tree lined gorge; the waterfall is positioned in the centre; we view it from the pool looking up giving the impression of their height; the black solidity of the rock is contrasted with the white liquidity of the water. What the new medium offers though is the feeling of, and indeed the actual capturing of, time. While the ancient rock remains immobile the impermanent water flows. The real time process of uncovering the camera’s blackened lens and allowing light to flood onto the photographic plate captures the actual movement of the water in a way that most painting could never achieve. The blurred white of the falling water has an ephemeral quality separate from everything else in the picture, not only the immemorial rock but the seasonal delicacy of the leaves on the trees. The trees for a few decades will fringe the river – their trunks and twigs a thin, black reflection of the linn’s many branches – but they will rot and die. The photograph of the waterfall I take today standing where Wilson stood a hundred and sixty years ago captures exactly the same water, the same rocks though the surrounding vegetation is different. Where the free-falling water stops in the pool at the bottom of the image it changes tone as it slows, now fading to grey, neither still nor torrent but moving gently, easing our eye out of the picture and on, like the river, beyond these moments with the course of our journey.
The sensation of movement captured in the photograph thrilled Victorian viewers and was developed further by innovations such as stereoscopic cards where double images placed side by side gave a binocular feeling of depth and space such as his ‘Fall on the Braan at the Hermitage Bridge, Dunkeld’ of 1863. By the 1880s Wilson was further experimenting, printing his images onto glass plates that were then hand coloured and could be viewed as ‘magic lantern’ slides, Wilson himself, presenting lectures to accompany a showing. By the time of his death in 1893 his photographic publishing firm was employing 40 people and accepting images from photographers from all over the world, his only rival operating on the same scale was James Valentine in Dundee.”
from ‘The Sound of Many Waters’
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Robin A Crawford 