This script is from my presentation ‘Early women photographers documenting Highland and Islands of Scotland: MEM Donaldson’. It was delivered at The Highland Folk Museum’s annual seminar ‘Unchartered places: pioneering women of early 20th century Scotland’, on 25.10.17. The seminar was established in honour of the Highland Folk Museum’s inspirational and pioneering founder Dr Isabel F Grant (1887-1983).

All the speakers, including Dr Margaret Bennett, Shona Main (PhD candidate, University of Stirling and The Glasgow School of Art) and Dr Pricilla Scott (University of Edinburgh) presented on pioneering women in Scotland, from the early 1900s, including the suffragette movement, the influence of forward looking women in the development of the Mod and early women photographers and filmmakers. The afternoon, of which my presentation was part of, was chaired by Dr Margaret Mackay (Honorary Fellow, University of Edinburgh).

My presentation focused on MEM Donaldson, beginning by tracing through Highland Folk Museum founder Isobel Frances Grant’s book ‘The Making of Am Fasgadh’ (National Museums Scotland, 2007) that the two women were known to each other. I outlined Donaldson and Grant's shared interest in Highland & Islands vernacular architecture. Grant also visited Donaldson’s home, Sanna Bheag, located on the Ardnamurchan peninsula. The presentation went on to outline Donaldson’s biography, outlining through two of her letters (held at National Library of Scotland) to the journalist Marion Lochhead that she viewed her choices in life – namely to be independent and travel in Scotland to write and photograph landscapes and people for her books- as running against the accepted norms of the woman’s place in Victorian society and her family’s wishes. I then assess Donaldson’s landscape photography, linking it to an ‘embodied’ perspective, through the lens of Nan Shepherd’s writing, where the experience of the landscape is a physical and psychological journey ‘into’. I go on to assert that Donaldson’s portraits of those working the land are framed differently from her peers as they are not posed, rather naturalistically inhabiting the landscape. The presentation concludes by presenting the work of Violet Banks, and her own photographs of MEM Donaldson’s home, Sanna Bheag, which I discovered in albums of Banks’ journeys in the Hebrides held at Royal Commission on the Ancient & Historical Monuments of Scotland.