A Different Country: Photographs by Werner Kissling

When the ?migr? German Werner Kissling died in a nursing home in Dumfries in 1988, few realized that he left behind him one of the most extensive photographic records of the Hebrides ever made. Werner Kissling came to Britain in 1931 in a diplomatic capacity, only to leave the service in order to pursue studies in ethnology, which he maintained for the rest of his life. He first visited the Western Isles in the early 1930s to make the first ever moving picture to use spoken Gaelic. This film, “A Poem of Remote Lives”, was filmed on Eriskay, and aroused considerable interest at the time, though afterwards lay forgotten in the archives of the School of Scottish Studies until the late 1970s. Kissling returned to Eriskay and South Uist almost every year until the war, taking hundreds of photographs, particularly of people involved in traditional crafts, making his work a valuable human record of a way of life now forever vanished. This collection includes over 100 of Kissling’s Hebridean photographs.