Islands in the Heart of the Country

Orkney-based photographer GUNNIE MOBERG is among the artists selected to make new work to hang in the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. ALISTAIR PEEBLES investigates her work among the people and landscapes of the Northern Isles.

Gunnie Moberg

WITH HER DISTINCTIVE style in composition, colour and subject matter, Gunnie Moberg has for many years been Orkney’s best-known photographer, widely admired at home and abroad. She has illustrated several books about her home islands, and about the island groups of Shetland and Faroe. Amongst her most celebrated publications are those made collaboratively in the 80s and 90s with her friend the late George Mackay Brown. Her skill and sure touch in landscape and portraiture have given memorable insights into the qualities of the places and people fortunate enough to have enjoyed her gentle scrutiny. No wonder then that she was one of the Scottish artists commissioned to make new work to hang in the new Parliament building in Edinburgh.

Gunnie lives about as far as it’s possible to travel on one of the best roads out of Stromness, the roof and gable capital of the northern hemisphere. The town lies snug around its harbour in the lee of Brinkie’s Brae, but if you follow the Outertown road, skirting Brinkie’s and its trail of cousins to the north, you trade gables for the best view of Hoy and the Atlantic, and roofs for an immensity of sky. Clearly there’s not so much shelter from the westerlies, but the trade is worth it if you’re not too fussed about shops around the corner, and especially if you have a window room like the one Gunnie likes to spend weeks in, painting this wonderful, ever-changing view. Or if you have a garden like she does, one that Brinkie’s cousins are happy to protect when the wind’s from the east, but can do nothing, nor can anyone, when the wind’s coming hard off the sea. It can be a struggle then.

But no one comes to live in a place like this who isn’t up for a challenge, who likes half-measures. Gunnie is Swedish; her husband Tam, who runs Stromness Books & Prints, is from California, and they arrived in Orkney in the 70s. They brought up their four sons here and they have been contributing to the islands’ flourishing literary and artistic life since then. They love the place and the people. That high regard, and their commitment to these islands will, I’m sure, be evident in the ten photographs Gunnie has selected for display. Or rather in about half of them, for the presentation includes work from visits to Shetland, a place similar to and very different from Orkney, that she knows and admires just as much.

The decision to photograph the two island groups for this commission had been hers, and she spoke about them with equal fondness when we swapped news in that window room recently. Originally, she had the same idea in mind for both.

Rather than landscape photography as that genre is commonly understood, she wanted to make pictures that were simple statements of place, closely-observed details that would be immediately recognisable to a Shetlander or Orcadian who happened to be visiting the parliament. Her initial themes were stone for Orkney and people for Shetland, but as she said, it didn’t turn out exactly like that. Indeed she found it more and more difficult to get exactly the kind of pictures she had in mind, always aware of the fact that unlike a short-term exhibition, these photographs would be on display for a long time. But she discovered as she went along what would work in order to achieve the aims she had set herself.

Gunnie Moberg

She produced a great deal of initial work, involving many journeys, walks, and many hours waiting and hoping for the right conditions to appear: often without getting the results that satisfied her. For example, she made several visits to a huge Shetlandic boulder, out in the middle of nowhere, a glacial erratic of about 6,000 tons, and she never got the right light – or not right enough for what she knew the possibilities really were, so those pictures never made it.

On the other hand, as is so often the case in photography, she would find herself unexpectedly in the right place at the right time, sometimes with only a split second to capture something perfect – and with the experience and good luck to use the opportunity. One of her photographs is taken from the top of North Ronaldsay lighthouse (a place as close as you can get to that erratic boulder without leaving Orkney). In strong side lighting, it shows rich pasture, the lighthouse shadow and an energetic line of sheep which had been ca’ed across the field. She’d arrived at the top at exactly that moment and had no time to check exposure, just line up the shot and hope the one picture before the sheep disappeared would turn out. And it did, beautifully. What gives the picture even more of an edge of fleeting drama is the fact that she’d been invited to the lighthouse quite by chance, by a film crew she knew who were there at the time, and whose arrangement to film the ca’ing-in of the sheep she was lucky enough to witness. That story itself tells us something about life in Orkney today.

In other cases, a sudden view of the moon rising in the context of some linear structures that she was working on – the new aerogenerators high on Burgar Hill or, by contrast, the standing stones inland – gave her the chance she needed. As did fog when she went back again one day to Mousa Broch in Shetland. Or simply looking down at the display outside the Shetland Library, to see the salvaged propellor from the Oceanic, wrecked in fog off Foula during the Great War. But Gunnie has been photographing Orkney and Shetland for 25 years now and she knows as well as anyone how to make the most of her opportunities with the fickle light and weather. A struggle from time to time, then, but as with her home in the Outertown, the views are fantastic when they come. As always, she uses an Olympus SLR, nothing larger, to make the most of these opportunities, and she has stuck with the film technology she knows best.

Recent years have seen Gunnie happy to leave her camera at home when she goes out walking in the countryside, and she is glad for the freedom to simply look and see. That word simple again. After so much work, however, she knows what she is looking for when she does take up her camera: linear qualities primarily, as she says, simple linear forms. There’s a good deal more than geometry to what characterises a Gunnie Moberg picture, however. I think they are as much about sheer delight in her subject matter, and trying to make that delight available to the rest of us. I was struck when she said she hoped her pictures might make Orkney and Shetland visitors to Holyrood feel more at home. Of all the reasons why the Scottish Parliament should be glad to fulfil its obligations towards contemporary artists in its new building, here’s one that is surely not controversial: this simple, honest and hospitable recognition of home that seems to be part of what we’ve all been looking for and hoping to see ourselves down there.