St Kilda: The Silent Islands

By Alex Boyd, Luath Press, £20, 192 pages, hardback, 978-1910745649

The austere beauty of St Kilda, a small volcanic archipelago 41 miles west of Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides, has been well documented. Landscape and documentary photographer Alex Boyd is not afraid to document the scars, military buildings and radar domes scattered around St Kilda, but he balances this out with images of the archipelago’s astonishing natural beauty. Many of the black & white images were shot on a medium-format camera that once belonged to Fay Godwin and, Boyd admits, he turned to her work both for guidance and as a point of departure. St Kilda: The Silent Islands is not a guidebook – nor was it intended to be – but it does deliver an incredible sense of place. ★★★★ ★ Tracy Calder