Isle of Rust

Shortlisted for the Favourite Scottish Nature Photography Book at the Scottish Nature Photography Awards 2020.

About the Book: 

Here, at the north-westernmost periphery of Europe is what feels like a presage of the future, the distant future, the furthest future, after which there’ll be no future at all. This is the Isle of Rust – known, too, as Lewis and Harris. It is a blueprint, a working model of the day which will have no tomorrow. Jonathan Meades

Isle of Rust not only refers to the countless corroding tractors, weaving sheds and other visible signs of human settlement but also to the colours of the land: the reds of deergrass and the purple moor grass which make up so much of the moorland. It is a place of great contrast in both light and land, from the largely flat peatlands of Lewis, where the majority of islanders make their home, to the mountains of Harris. Alex Boyd

It’d be easy to mistake these landscapes for ruins. Rust is not ruin. There is in Meades-Boyd some kind of shared attention to the detritus of human life. They open their eyes to the humanity that inheres in what outlasts people’s lives. Dan Hicks

Reviews:

Boyd is an equal opportunities snapper, one who refuses to discriminate based on conventional ideas of what is ‘worth’ photographing and what is not. ROGER COX, The Scotsman

An a ectionate but by no means nostalgic or romanticised view of one of Europe’s furthest edges. JOHN McDOUGALL, Bella Caledonia

Praise for St Kilda: The Silent Islands

Alex Boyd’s images represent a major addition to the tradition of modern landscape photography. ROBERT MacFARLANE

Alex Boyd captures the natural beauty magnificently, while his studies of radar stations and other signs of the islands’ military presence, reveal another side to this captivating place. THE ROYAL PHOTOGRAPHIC SOCIETY

About the Authors:

ALEX BOYD is a photographer, curator and writer based in the west of Scotland. He lived in the Outer Hebrides until recently. His work has been widely exhibited internationally with solo exhibitions at the Scottish Parliament, as well as group exhibitions at the Royal Academy, Royal Ulster Academy and Royal Scottish Academy. His work is held in the collections of the National Galleries of Scotland, The Royal Photographic Society, the Royal Scottish Academy, the V&A, and the Yale Centre for British Art in the US. His first book, St. Kilda: The Silent Islands, was shortlisted for the Saltire Society First Book Award in 2018.

JONATHAN MEADES is a writer, journalist, essayist, film-maker. His books include three works of fiction, and several anthologies including Museum Without Walls, which received 13 nominations as a book of the year in 2012. An Encyclopaedia of Myself won Best Memoir in the Spear’s Book Awards 2014 and was shortlisted for the 2015 Pen Ackerley Prize. Meades has written and performed in more than 50 television shows on predominantly topographical subjects such as shacks, garden cities, and megastructures. He is currently working on a film about Franco. His most recently broadcast film was Jonathan Meades on Jargon (BBC Four), described in The Guardian as ‘blisteringly brutal, clever and hilarious’.