The 150th Edinburgh International Photographic Exhibition

Joe Grabham reviews:

For anyone thinking of visiting the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this summer (and there is much to recommend it), then a small detour from the main focus of events will take you to Edinburgh Photographic Society’s International Print Exhibition. I say a small detour, it’s actually a ten to fifteen minute walk from the High Street - enough to make Stephen ask of Neil “Are we there yet?” quite a few times. Once we arrived though, we were suitably impressed by the location; a rather grand Georgian terraced house, complete with brass nameplate, which is home to the Society.

The exhibition itself is made up of around 200 prints set up in an airy room on the ground floor and needless to say, in a salon of such prestige as this, the quality of the images was uniformly excellent. Much of what was on show could be described as ‘contemporary’, but there was room for the occasional traditional landscape and portrait too. Even so, it was very noticeable just how many of the pictures had impressionistic content and how much imagination had come into play in the production of the images (and, as an aside, it was Tony who spotted that only one acceptance had a black mount!).

For those who have ever trawled the acceptances pages of Internationals there were some very familiar names here –Rickki O’Neill, Anne Greiner, Diane Owen, Dave Coates (all having presented at Durham PS), and Libby Smith and Christine Widdall (visiting us in Durham next year) all won awards, but the pièce de résistance was from rising star KT Allen, who won the medal for best in show with her magical image “Evacuee Triplets”. There were some stunning images here and this exhibition is very highly recommended. The £4 entry free includes a high-quality catalogue of all the prints in the Salon and the exhibition runs until 2^nd September.

Joe Grabham