Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert: In Conversation.

In May 2021, the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Research Collections and School of Scottish Studies Archive sat down with Scottish documentary photographer Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert to discuss his photography and a new collection of his work entering the University's archives. The acquisition formed part of the year-long celebration marking the 70th anniversary of the School of Scottish Studies and concentrated on three bodies of Sutton-Hibbert's documentary photography: North Sea Fishing, photographed between 1992 and 1995; Longannet Colliery in Fife, photographed in 2001; and Paddy's Market in Glasgow, photographed in 2000. In conversation with Daryl Green, then Head of Special Collections at the University of Edinburgh, Sutton-Hibbert discusses the photographs, the communities and working environments represented in them and the importance of placing documentary photography within an archive where it can remain accessible for future research. This is that interview.

The School of Scottish Studies was established at the University of Edinburgh in 1951 to research and document Scotland's languages, traditions, communities and cultural life. Over the following decades its archive developed into a substantial research collection containing photographs, sound recordings, manuscripts and fieldwork documenting subjects ranging from oral history and traditional music to working practices and everyday life across Scotland. The School's 70th anniversary in 2021 provided an opportunity to consider how this collecting tradition could be extended through contemporary documentary photography. The acquisition of Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert's photographs of North Sea fishing, Longannet Colliery and Paddy's Market continued that approach by adding recent visual records of industries, workplaces and communities undergoing significant change. The accompanying conversation places the photographs within this broader archival context and allows Sutton-Hibbert to explain the circumstances in which the projects were made and the people and places they document.

Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert (born 1969) is a Scottish documentary photographer and photojournalist from Glasgow who studied photography at the Glasgow College of Building and Printing. Beginning his professional career around the end of the 1980s, he has worked internationally for newspapers, magazines, NGOs and commercial clients, with photographs published by Time, National Geographic, The Guardian, The Sunday Times and other publications. His long-term projects include more than two decades of assignments for Greenpeace International, covering subjects such as Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean, illegal logging in Papua New Guinea and rising sea levels in the Pacific. He lived in Japan between 2003 and 2012 and photographed the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster. His Scottish work has included North Sea fishing, shipbuilding on the Clyde, Longannet Colliery, Paddy's Market, political campaigning, football culture and the Common Riding festivals, while his long-running documentation of the Roma community at Sintesti in Romania extended from 1990 to 2019. In 2012 he co-founded the documentary photography collective Document Scotland, and his wider professional archive, comprising material from more than three decades of work and approximately one million images, was subsequently acquired by the University of St Andrews for its photographic collections.

Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert
Document Scotland
School of Scottish Studies

Intro Music
Forever Free - Philip Ayers

Camera is on:
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In Conversation with Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert (2021).
Produced by the University of Edinburgh, Centre for Research Collections and School of Scottish Studies Archive.
Source: University of Edinburgh Open.Ed.
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

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