Diary of a Shopkeeper, 17th April
For the past two weeks the Orkney Library and Archive has hosted a fascinating exhibition of photos, books and press cuttings featuring Gunnie Moberg, the ‘Swedish Orcadian’ photographer who captured the character of these islands like no one before.
Shortly after arriving in Orkney in 1976, Gunnie started working behind the desk at Kirkwall airport. This brought frequent opportunities to hitch a ride in the Loganair planes doing the rounds of the outer isles. The flights were a revelation for Gunnie, opening her eyes to a new way of seeing Orkney, both its natural patterns – sweeping shorelines, sandstone cliffs, whirling seabirds – and human ones – standing stones, rows of stooks, sheep dykes.
Inspired to return to a youthful interest in photography, she quickly developed both her technique and her vision. Over thirty years of work, she established a major reputation, exhibiting widely and collaborating on a series of indispensable books about Orkney and our northern neighbours Shetland and Faeroe. She also became firm friends with George Mackay Brown, Peter Maxwell Davis and many other writers and artists. She assembled an astonishing collection of portraits of visiting luminaries such as Janice Galloway, Isaac Stern, and Seamus Heaney, as well as of ordinary Orcadians going about their daily lives.
Her photos – many of them aerial shots and portraits, but also semi-abstract close-ups of plants in her Ootertoon garden – are now held in collections such as the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the Scottish Parliament. They’re also on the walls of many homes across these islands, and above all preserved in the Library and Archive. This local appreciation is very fitting, for Gunnie played a full part in the Orkney community – despite being a thoroughly non-conformist individual.
In fact she didn’t just play a part in a pre-existing, unchanging community. Her new ways of seeing Orkney altered the way everyone living here – and many who have yet to visit – picture, and therefore think about, the islands. Notable photographers of the 19th and early- to mid-20th century such as Tom Kent and David Horne tended to view everything from six feet off the ground. Of course they did: that was their eye level, and the extent of their tripod’s extension. Only Dougie Shearer took quantities of aerial photos, but they were chiefly records of the appearance of buildings and townscapes, not particularly striking as images in their own right.
Gunnie made us see the harmony and tension of landscape from 500 metres above, and the fractal complexity of foliage and rockpool from five centimetres away. Of her precursors, only Wilfred Marr had a comparable eye for the abstract beauty hidden within everyday Orkney. Gunnie went beyond Marr’s example to create a body of work with endless capacity to surprise, to delight, and to make us exclaim, ‘Yes! I’d never seen it like that before, but that’s exactly how it is!’
Gunnie’s legacy lives in us, and we live in her legacy.
One particularly poignant exhibit was a ‘Questionnaire’ clipped from The Orcadian and dated 1989. This regular feature used to put a series of questions to notable local folk, and the brief answers necessitated by the format meant people couldn’t beat about the bush. When asked, ‘If you ruled the country for one day, what changes would you make?’ Gunnie replied as follows:
‘I would make the environment issue top priority. We are seeing the whole world coming together over the Gulf crisis. I would hope the same energy, effort and money could be spent on saving our planet.’
With war raging in Ukraine, and environmental disaster looming closer than ever, Gunnie’s words from 33 years ago seem remarkably prescient. It wasn’t only in her photography that she made clear-sighted and powerful statements.
From the exhibition: young Gunnie with medieval stone carvings at Saddell Abbey, Mull of KIntryre.
We’re lucky enough to have two Gunnie photographs hanging in the shop. They show overflowing stalls from an Indian food market, and were taken during Gunnie and Tam’s visit to friends there in the early 1990s. We haven’t seen these picture anywhere else, so they’re well worth a look next time you’re in. They’re particularly special to us, as they were gifts from Gunnie.
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 20th April. A new one appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.