On holiday in Crete in 2006, a chance meeting by Robert Burns with three Ukrainians kindled an interest that has brought the Glasgow photographer back to that ravaged country again and again. Best known for his portraits and coverage of jazz festivals, Robert is internationally recognised as a printmaker for his ability to get the best results, not only from his own creations, but also from the negative of other celebrated photographers. For ‘A Window On Ukraine’, Robert’s extraordinary work demonstrates his keen interest and empathy for the plight of the ordinary people in Kiev and other nearby towns and cities. He has recorded the joys and sorrows of Ukrainian life, the weddings, the festivals, children at play and vibrant street life. Robert’s work is currently benefitting charities there, particularly aiding children in Eastern Ukraine, where the horrors of Chernobyl still affect life decades after that horrendous disaster, with civil war now bringing further grief to the country.

The renowned Canadian-born photographer Margaret Watkins lived in Glasgow unknown for more than forty years until her death in 1969. She left a legacy of more than twelve hundred superb images of exhibition standard, mainly of her work in the 1910′s and 1920′s in New York. A further treasure emerged after her death of thousands of negatives and occasional prints of her visits to Europe. More immediately, she took some seven hundred photographs of Glasgow in the 1930′s. This exhibition shows previously-unseen contact prints and enlargements which have been processed by master-printer Robert Burns, who has used the same chemical processes that Margaret Watkins would have utilised including selenium toning.

Only at the Hidden Lane Gallery; ends April 14th 2015

The older Glasgow paintings and prints underline how much the city has changed over the years, and includes many rare and original watercolours from the late eighteen hundreds by David Small, the illustrator of many now-rare books on Glasgow.

Exhibition runs from October 18th to late November 2014.

Open Tuesday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Seeing ourselves as the press sees us is the current exhibition at the Hidden Lane Gallery.

Scottish identity is the subject of this exhibition of photos shown in conjunction with the Scottish Press Photographers Association, highlighting the work of editorial photographers. The chosen pictures range from politics to sport and features, documentary, landscape, the street, portraiture, industry, to the arts and entertainment. The brief to photographers was to keep it as open as possible they could interpret the brief as tartan or as tenuous as they wished. And images could be new or from their archive.

In total the exhibition represents 35 photographers working in the editorial photography within Scotland. It is a good mix of staff and freelance photographers. We would like to thank the participation from the staff photographers of The Herald and Evening Times, The Sunday Mail and Daily Record and The Scottish Sun.

Thanks also to our selection panel which included Gallery Owner Joe Mullholland, Photographer and Lecturer Brian Swinburne and former Sunday Times (Scotland) Picture Editor, now currently at The Sunday Post, Jeremy Bayston.

The Hidden Lane Gallery shows palladium and platinum prints by Margaret Watkins and many of her students at the Clarence White School of Photography in the period 1919-1925.

The School opened in New York in 1914. Watkins attended its Summer Schools and was apprenticed to Alice Boughton, a portrait photographer in Boston, herself taught by the renowned photographer Gertrude Kasebier. Watkins became a full time student around 1917, and within a few years joined the staff. The curriculum for the school included commercial and hand-coated platinum, silver, printing out and gaslight, single and multiple carbon , single and cowhide gum, oil, bromoil and photogravure.

During the First World War the price of platinum rocketed, as it was needed for explosives and ammunition – which multiplied the cost of making platinum prints. This led to the development (by William Willis in 1915) of the palladium process, using a metal closely related to platinum, and creating Palladiotype paper. White, Watkins and others at the school adopted this process.

After her arrival in Glasgow in 1928, Watkins continued to use palladium – but more importantly for the current exhibition, she bequeathed her own photographs and a unique collection of many by her students to her neighbour Joe Mulholland. These show works by known and unknown names; class exercises demonstrating up to ten different treatments of a single image, her hot processes, blue prints, carbon examples and some processes which even the experts are now unclear how the effects were achieved – or what the process was.

Margaret Watkins and the Clarence White School: Palladium and Platinum Prints 1919 – 1925 is part of the Blueprint Photography Festival, along with venues including Trongate 103, Street Level, Glasgow Print Studio, the University of Glasgow, Riverside Museum, the Mitchell Library and RGI Kelly Gallery. The exhibition runs from February 8th until March 12th, 2013.

Arrested by officers of OGPU — the KGB’s predecessor — Margaret Watkins claimed her photographs of their HQ in Moscow were purely to record post-revolutionary Russia. The Glasgow-based photographer was in a group organised by a fellow member of the Royal Photographic Society, through Intourist, the State agency charged with bringing visitors, and foreign currency, to the country.

It was in August 1933 that they set off from a wharf on the Thames near Tower Bridge, London, in the State-owned Cooperatzia. First call was Leningrad, where they were given the ground rules; photograph no bridges, military installations, soldiers’ manoeuvres, public or military buildings — especially not the Kremlin. These could be of use to foreign enemies planning a bombing campaign on the understandably paranoid post-Revolution State. So only the odd soldier in the streets or on stage at a state-run youth rally. Lots of snaps of processions, picturesque windows, interesting characters and blocks of workers’ flats. These latter would show how the Soviet Socialist Republic looked after the proletariat.

One building looked as interesting as the next to Canadian-born Margaret Watkins, who had come to Glasgow in 1928 to visit her maiden aunts in Hyndland, in the house from where her mother had married in 1877. Worker flats were snapped with titles later appended by her, like “Reconstruction” or “Progress”. However, one block proved to be a problem. No sooner had she set up her Graflex camera and clicked a few shots than she was descended on by the security police, and rushed to the secret police headquarters.

Hours of interrogation by junior officials followed and things looked gloomy for her. She explained that she thought the impressive building looked like good workers’ acccommodation. Her camera and films were taken away to be examined. A senior official became involved. She explained again. She was a photographer, following in the footsteps of one of her illustrious pupils, Margaret Bourke-White, who had visited Russia a couple of years before, and produced a six-part series (adulatory, of course) on Russia. The series had been published the previous year in the New York Times magazine, to the great joy of the Russian State propagandists.

Sense prevailed and she was released, with her beloved Graflex — but sans film. All film taken on the trip had to be surrendered to the authorities, who had it developed, inspected and (if found to contain no prohibited images) returned in a sealed envelope. This envelope had to be produced at the port of departure, opened by the Secret Police agent there, and checked against the inventory of approved images that accompanied it.

Margaret Watkins got out of the country with over 600 negatives. She made silver gelatin prints from a small number of these (some to exhibition standard) when she returned to her aunts’ home in Westbourne Gardes in Glasgow’s West End.

Eighteen of her original prints are now on show at the Hidden Lane Gallery in Argyle Street, Finnieston in Glasgow, together with another 80 from the “approved” negatives. These are also silver gelatin prints, made by Glasgow master printer and photographer Robert Burns. Most of these are now printed for the first time.

The Hidden Lane Gallery, at 1081 Argyle Street, Glasgow G3 8LZ, is open Tuesday to Saturday from 11am-5pm (www.hiddenlanegallery.com). The Margaret Watkins “Leningrad and Moscow 1933″ exhibition is on until 6th February 2013.