Gunnie Moberg

From Stone

Many years ago, when the Kirkwall Library was still in Laing Street, I sat in the Orkney Room carefully turning the deckle-edged pages of a book.  

It was called Stone and was a collaboration between photographer Gunnie Moberg and writer George Mackay Brown and it contains photographs and poems about stone. 

I must have sat there over an hour looking at that one slender book. The poems were beautiful - a retelling of many of GMB's themes and tropes - and I have read them many times over the years. 

The photographs were astounding! I had never seen any like it. From inauspicious cracks and crevices in rock, from marks made by water, from pebbles trapped in narrow fissures, Gunnie Moberg had created stunning images, flowing, curvaceous, sensuous, some almost erotic. 

The book was a limited edition and is one that I have coveted for many years. But I am lucky! There is a copy still in the Orkney Room at Orkney Library & Archives and I have my hands on it again today.

Page 20 of the book, Stone

For today came the official announcement that all of Gunnie Moberg's work as a photographer - and much more - will be held in the Archives here and will be properly catalogued and stored and shown eventually to the wider public.

The work to gain funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund was started over two years ago by Gary Amos, Library & Archive Manager, and David Mackie, Senior Archivist, and at last money was granted to engage someone for two years to perform the painstaking work of going through all the boxes to see what's there.

Year one will see the cataloguing done. There will be no access to the collection during that time. But there will be an online presence - a website or a blog - set up once the project worker is in post. And the second year will see the new worker look at ways to exhibit the work.  

The Knap o Howar, Papa Westray, photographed from the air by Gunnie Moberg

What a treat that person will have once they have been recruited! There are 1255 items, a tantalising number of boxes with unknown contents: rolls of film, thousands of negatives, diaries and notebooks, birthday cards and letters all waiting for careful hands and eyes to create a definitive and detailed catalogue. Item 663 is a box labelled Manuscripts & Books of Old Orkney, a glimpse of how many treasures must be contained in 1255 items! 

I spoke to David Mackie this morning and his brief description of a tiny selection of the contents made me long to have a look myself.

The Archive contains everything to do with Gunnie's life as a photographer and as a public person.

There are cards from Peter Maxwell Davis and George Mackay Brown: one from PMD contains musical notes - a tune for Gunnie for her birthday! And from her long-time friend George Mackay Brown there is a handwritten acrostic poem using her name, something he did for many of his friends.

One letter from George in hospital apologises to her for being in a dark mood when she visited.

But Gunnie Moberg did much more than take photographs: she created a beautiful garden out of uncultivated ground around the house in Stromness where she lived with her husband Tam MacPhail, who runs Stromness Books & Prints along with Sheena Winter. 

Gunnie Moberg in her Garden - Copyright Alistair Peebles

And she took part with other activists in the protest in the 1970s against a planned seal cull, summoning Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior, and camping out on the uninhabited island of North Rona, a hundred miles or so west of Orkney, to stop the men commissioned to club the baby seals to death. The campaign was recorded in the book, Let the Seals Live by Sue Flint, 1979.    

One of her notebooks has diary entries detailing her interest in wildlife. In my notebook I discovered I'd recorded: 

Gunnie fed ravens below the Black Craig ...

It is like the first line of a poem!

I didn't ever meet Gunnie Moberg except through her photographs, but I have a - possibly romantic - sense that her life and her work were in harmony, almost as if her life itself was her greatest work of art. Her beauty and her personality certainly drew many to her. As GMB said in Shetland Diary (published in Northern Lights 1999):

'That's the way it is with Gunnie; people tend towards the brightness of her nature.'

A view shared by all it seems, as can be seen from this lovely film about Gunnie. (You can see it by clicking the link above.) The film was made by Mark Jenkins, a film maker based in Orkney, and was commissioned by the Pier Arts Centre.

Gunnie took warmly engaging photos of GMB and of many of the writers and artists who visited Orkney.

Seamus Heaney photographed by Gunnie Moberg

How lucky are we to have this body of Gunnie Moberg's work permanently here in Orkney Library & Archive.

Photo of Gunnie by Janke De Vries

Gunnie Moberg's and GMB's signatures at the end of Stone

     

In the Tardis with Orkney Photographic Archive

It's impossible to spend only a day in the Photographic Archives at Orkney Library & Archive and get to grips with what an amazing place it is and what a resource for the community.

Only the other day on Radio Orkney, I heard a piece about the Westray Heritage Trust who are mounting an exhibition of photographs by Robert Heddle Robertson from 100 years ago, and inviting today's islanders to take photographs of the same locations, in the same seasons. It will give a fascinating insight into how Westray folk lived then and how they live now.

Many of the photographs by RH Robertson came from Orkney Photographic Archives which holds over 2,500 of his glass plates. 

Senior archivist, David Mackie, manages the archive and Colin Rendall looks after it and does the printing of negatives for members of the public. He is passionate about the value of them as an historic collection and as a resource for Orkney, the islands they depict through the ages.

Colin gave me a tour of the archives. First, he invited me into his Tardis, a cylindrical division between the public office and the dark room, where he time-travels regularly back to far off days in Orkney. Well, at least as far back as photography goes.

He told me that the earliest dated photographic print held here is this one from 1863 of the Channel Fleet in Kirkwall Bay. It came as a surprise to me to think of photography being around at the same time as a naval fleet made up of sailing ships. There are possibly earlier photographs too among the collection, but with no dates on them, that can't be verified.

Waving in the Light

While I was there, Colin was dealing with a customer who wanted a print of an aerial photograph of East Road in Kirkwall. In the dark room, he showed me the process he goes through to create a negative from the existing print and then develop it. 

As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I noticed Colin waving his fingers above the developing photograph. This, he tells me, is how you control how much light gets through, so that more detail will show up on dark areas of the print. And sure enough, suddenly the dark shadows at the edges lifted to reveal bushes and plants. 

To an amateur like me whose only experience of manipulating photographs has been in the digital age through Photoshop, this was fun!


Equipped to Develop

I'm used to the slick-looking tools of the digital era, so the machinery housed in the back rooms of the archives look like museum pieces. And in a sense they are. Except that equipment like this which will develop film, is increasingly hard to come by. As Archive Technician, it is Colin's job to keep the machines in good working order, so that they will continue to provide prints of the thousands of glass plates and film negatives stored by the archive. 

Negative to Print

Colin looked out an example of a glass plate and the print that was made from it so that I could photograph them - with my little digital camera! - for the blog.

Glass plate negative

The print from the negative

This is a Tom Kent photograph of two little girls standing in Dundas Crescent, Kirkwall, taken between 1898 and 1936, the period covering his work, but clearly, going by the style of the clothes, dating from the earlier years of the 20th century if not the end of the 19th. The details, the 'nowness' of the instant captured, with the long shadows cast by that day's sun, are astonishing.

Tom Kent

The Drowned & Stony Road to Conservation

Colin is quite convinced that digital photography will never match film for the quality of light and detail, so it is in all our interests to preserve what we have in Orkney Photographic Archive and guard it with our lives. 

But there has been many a blood-curdling mishap in the process of collecting and safeguarding the work of our early photographers. In the 1930s two young boys came across some dirty old pieces of glass down a lane off Broad Street in Kirkwall. They lined them up against a wall and threw stones at them. What lay in smithereens at their feet when they'd finished were some of Tom Kent's plates. 

RH Robertson

A truck load of the glass plates of RH Robertson was intercepted on its way to be dumped in a quarry in Westray. 

And a diver diving in Stromness harbour found some funny looking pieces of glass with dark markings on them. They turned out to be the photographic plates of William Hourston.

William Hourston

Luckily, the archives still hold 4,830 of Tom Kent's plates, 2,917 of RH Robertson's and 1,045 of William Hourston's, as well as many images by other photographers. Between 1867 and 1914, forty two photographers were listed as working in Orkney.

I asked Colin what message he'd like to get across to people in Orkney about the archives. In the mildest, gentlest tones possible, difficult to convey in the bold type necessary to make it stand out, he said,

'Don't throw away old photos or negatives. I've had folk saying to me, I wish I'd known this place was here, I wouldn't have burnt my granny's old photos. I didn't think they would be of any interest. 

'Please let us be the judge of that. Take them here and we can make copies of them and give you back the originals. Or we can keep them here and preserve them. Family photographs can be valuable social documents, showing how work, culture, customs, clothes, buildings or even scenery in the background have changed over time in Orkney.'  

Connections

I had to work quite hard to extract permission from Colin to show the photo above. A talented photographer himself, though modest to the point of self-effacement, he took this picture in February 1978. It looks so like the big seas we've had in Orkney in the past few days, it seemed an apt image to end with. My digital photo of the print doesn't nearly do it justice.

Dougie Shearer

Colin learned his photography from another notable Orkney practitioner, Dougie Shearer, who was also his fiddle teacher. He taught Colin how to process negatives and how to alter the appearance of a print while it was in the developing fluid by lifting out a bit you wanted lighter, and splashing bits you wanted darker. An even earlier version of waving your fingers over the developing print! Colin told me that Dougie was so particular and careful that he passed on a deep and serious knowledge of the processes of photography that has stayed with him ever since.

Thank you to Colin Rendall, David Mackie and Bobby Leslie for the information in this blog. And thank you to David for permission to use information from a paper he produced for the New Orkney Antiquarian Journal Volume 5, entitled, The Orkney Photographic Archive.

Look out for the next blog for more images and information about the different photographers.