BYRNE & SWINTON’S GUIDE TO EDINBURGH
In December 2018 I spent 2½ days in Edinburgh, only my second visit to the home of several generations of my paternal forebears. My partner had work to do there, but I was at leisure, free to explore and photograph the streets of the city centre from our hotel base on South Bridge. On the morning of my last day, I had a brief encounter with the artist and playwright John Byrne and his former partner, actor Tilda Swinton. I had seen that John Byrne was having an exhibition of his prints and paintings in the Royal Scottish Academy, and I had dropped by to see it, before heading to the airport for my flight home. As I moved around the gallery, I was surprised to notice the unmistakable figures of Byrne and Swinton examining one of the larger works. Later, sitting with a coffee in the busy café of the Academy, I realised they were now standing immediately behind me, queuing, and that Swinton was already anxiously looking for somewhere to sit; Byrne is quite elderly now. So I offered her my table for the price of a photograph, which she gratefully accepted. We sat together and made conversation for a short while, then I then left them to it. On my blog, later that week, I had a bit of Photoshop fun removing the two of them from the Academy café context, and putting them in front of a couple of the Edinburgh scenes I had photographed, like a pair of tourists or tour guides. Then, two years later, it occurred to me that I had made enough usable photographs in my 2½ days to make a short sequence in the same way, like a flicker-book in which the two figures remain constant and immobile, but the background changes with each turn of the page. This is a selection of images from the resulting little book.
