A timeless, dynamic view of the Highland Games

Robbie Lawrence first went to the Highland Games as a child. The traditional events – which involves dance, music and sporting competitions that include the hammer throw, tug o’ war and a hill race – have been a part of Scotland’s cultural fabric for millennia, with historical records tracing them back to the time of King Malcolm III in the late 11th century.

Seeing his country face the aftermath of the 2014 independence referendum, which saw its population split 55% to 45% in favour of remaining as part of the United Kingdom, Lawrence began to think of the Games and their modern-day symbolism, but also their purpose. “I selected it as a subject as a vehicle into understanding cultural nationalism in Scotland at the moment,” he explains. “I had initially been looking for ways to talk about the political state of the country, but then I got more focused on this idea of cultural nostalgia, and why we as Scots are hooked up on a drip with ideas of the past.”

But it was when the Edinburgh-born photographer first began digging into the American iterations of the Games, that he began to take in their complexity, and how such events interweave with personal and national identities. “I realised through research that the Highland Games are bigger over there than it is in Scotland,” Lawrence explains. “In Scotland, the need to identify as a Scottish act seems like less of a necessity, whilst in America, there’s a real desire to identify with Scotland. It became about how we use myth to inform who we are today.”

Over the course of five years, the photographer travelled to Highland Games editions across Scotland and the USA, taking hundreds of photographs in the process. Now, several of them are presented in his recently published photobook Long Walk Home. Broken up into two parts, the first book focuses on photography taken live at the sporting events. Often cropped up close in the midst of action, there’s a timeless grain to many of the shots, which feel as if they could have been snapped at any point over the previous century given an absence of markers of the modern age.

Focusing on the three main pillars of the Games – sport, music and dance – they are also difficult to place geographically, despite the prevalence of tartan and traditional Scottish attire throughout. “My initial worry with going to America was that the pictures would stand out,” Lawrence says. “But what was really interesting while I was making the work was the odd similarities in terms of landscape and characters.”

In the second book, studio portraits weave in and out of a reflective essay penned by writer and poet John Burnside. With models dressed in traditional garb, while re-enacting sporting acts or music-making, it provides an alternative vision of the games to the first, constructed entirely by the photographer and writer themselves, in their own versions of mythmaking. “John sadly passed away in the spring before the book came out,” says Lawrence. “A lot of it is linked to his own childhood experiences of [The Highland Games], and makes the text feel more pertinent, and links to my final conclusion that this was a community, child-like experience for people.”

Across the half-decade of making the project, Lawrence came to appreciate its value for people, and especially families, even if his original interest towards the Games were sceptical. “Given that I came in with it from a point of view that was scrutinising why these things still existed and why they are held up as a sort of identification around who we are as Scots, I was really pleased by the experience of engaging with people there,” he says. “It reminded me that an analogue world still exists – there’s kids there, people dedicated to these dancers, music, and it’s hard to be cynical about something like this.

“What actually cut through for me was that this wasn’t necessarily about any kind of thematics,” he continues. “It wasn’t about a wider holistic idea of who we are, but on a fundamental level, it’s really about people coming together and spending time with each other.”

Long Walk Home by Robbie Lawrence is published by Stanley/Barker.

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