Robin Gillanders

Robin Gillanders

Robin Gillanders is a lecturer in photography at Edinburgh’s Napier University, School of Design and Media Arts. He spent many years as an advertising and commercial photographer specializing in portraits. He was educated at the Royal High School and Edinburgh University, where he read history and went on to teach it, until 1983 when he took up his post at Napier. He was influenced by John Blakemore and describes him as a great inspiration as he presented a new way of reading photographs even though his main concern was not portraiture.



I came across his book The Photographic Portrait in the book shop on Ashby High Street. I’ve found it very useful and based my first studio session around an exercise in the book which explores the use of body language to convey a message in portrait photography. It is said that only around 7% of the meanings during communication is conveyed by words. Approximately 23 % is conveyed by tone of voice and a whopping 70% of the meaning is passed to the recipient by body language. It gave me a ‘mission’ to complete which I find the best way to practise rather than just playing around with the camera.


In this book he writes from the perspective of a practitioner and starts to explore the difference between a real portrait and a casual photograph, giving meaning to the picture and how to relate the image to the sitter giving them personality and referencing influences in their own lives. He has a long association with Ian Finlay and his famous garden ‘Little Sparta’ near Edinburgh and produced a book on his garden ‘Little Sparta, Portrait of a Garden’.

Gillanders has mounted each of the photographs onto canvas
with 'little tears and rents' in it to echo 'the idea of a sail'
to emphasise Finlay's interest in boats and the sea.
Mdeium: Silver Gelatine print.

The portraits in the book are all his own and are taken in a wide variety of locations, with many different subjects, showing group portraits indoors and outdoors, individual studio work and location settings.

He also explores different mediums from digital to Polaroid to silver gelatine print and I hope to take some 35mm black and white film myself which I used to enjoy so much.

Robert L an actor.
30 year old print taken and hand developed by Pip.

He’s also using many different light sources from natural light only to car headlights, single flash with softbox to full studio set ups and reflectors. The diversity of examples is particularly helpful and he doesn’t seem to get stuck in a rut with one winning formula endlessly repeated.

He is generally sympathetic to his sitters and likes to include details of their lives and occupations in the set up of his portrait, he mentions particular admiration for Halla Beloff, a social psychologist who has written widely on the subject of photography from a psychologist’s point of view. His portrait of a lollipop man includes children’s’ drawings, teddy bear and model lollipop man but it is set in his own house to tell us more about the subject rather than the obvious context outside the school.

I particularly like the layout of this picture of three women who he became close to in the aftermath of a tragedy involving one of their friends. He also produced a more diffuse black and white version which seems stronger and more expressive.