Revealing a Lost World
Ron O’Donnell’s journey through Edinburgh’s unseen and forgotten interiors
RON O’DONNELL - Edinburgh: A Lost World is a one floor exhibition at the City Art Centre featuring black & white and colour photographs of unseen and forgotten Edinburgh interiors by contemporary Scottish artist Ron O’Donnell.
Known today for his constructed photography and large-scale installations, O’Donnell began his artistic career as a photographer.
He was born in Stirling in 1952 and studied photography at Napier Polytechnic in Edinburgh. He later went on to work as a trainee photographer at Stirling University, taught in prison education and eventually returned to Edinburgh Napier University as a lecturer in photography.
O’Donnell has always had a curious and insatiable desire to document the city. Looking for unusual interiors, he would cycle around with his camera – a tool he used to access hidden spots that many people never saw.
He was drawn to old fashioned, cluttered, and run-down interiors. On display for the first time are around 40 photographs from O’Donnell’s impressive archive of these little-known and lost places in Edinburgh.
The images depict prison cells, public toilets and laundrettes, as well as local shops such as greengrocers and fishmongers. They were taken during the 1970s, 1980s and three decades later. Some of the early works date from when O’Donnell was a student and many of these places are no longer in existence.
Curator Maeve Toal said: “The artworks on display reveal the social changes that have taken place in Edinburgh, some illustrate how our behaviour as consumers has shifted dramatically over the years from local communities to global online markets. The exhibition highlights how many of these once busy and flourishing shops have now disappeared from the city’s landscape.” O’Donnell said: “I started taking some of these photographs of interiors as a student. Shooting them, became an absolute compulsion, a desire to record on film a vanishing city. In retrospect, I was privileged to have been allowed to document these places, given access to behind-the-scenes areas, through the generosity of the various owners. I hope that the images I have captured will become a fascinating document of this great city.”
The exhibition is part of a photographic season at the