The MacKinnon Collection contains more than 16,000 images spanning 100 years of Scottish life. It has been jointly acquired by the National Library of Scotland and National Galleries of Scotland.
Put together by photography enthusiast Murray MacKinnon, the collection covers a wide range of subjects, including family portraits, street scenes, working life, sport, transport, and landscapes.
These photographs show how much Scotland changed from the 1840s — the early days of photography — to the 1940s.
They record day-to-day lives and social and economic changes that affected them as a result of industrialisation, war, and advancements in medicine and technology.
Highlights
Highlights of this remarkable historic collection include:
- More than 600 original photographs from the pioneering days of photography featuring work from David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (1821-1848), James Ross (d.1878) and John Thomson (d.1881), Cosmo Innes (1798-1874) and Horatio Ross (1801-1886)
- Some of the finest work of Thomas Annan (1829-1887) and his son, James Craig Annan (1864-1946) including rare examples of their original albumen prints
- Fine examples of the work of Scotland's successful commercial photographers including George Washington Wilson (1823-1893) and James Valentine (1815-1880)
- Portraits of Scottish regiments from the Crimean War by Roger Fenton (1819-1869)
- A series of albums and prints depicting life in the main towns and cities from the late 1800s and early 1900s
- Studies of farming and fishing communities in remote villages and hamlets
- Scenes of shipbuilding, railways, herring fishing, weaving, whisky distilling, dockyards, slate quarries and other working environments.
Support and development
After a four-year project to catalogue and to digitise the collection, it is now available for consultation in the Library's Special Collections Reading Room. Images from the bound volumes in the collection will be available on the Library's Digital Gallery. Individual images from the collection are also being published on the National Galleries of Scotland website.
We need your help
We have not yet been able to identify some of the people and locations that appear in the photographs in the MacKinnon Collection. If you have any information relating to any of the photographs, we would like to hear from you. Please contact us using our online enquiries form.
