What methods can be used to define early 20th-century women photographers’ unique ‘ways of seeing’ rural Highlands and Islands Scotland through the camera lens? This article seeks to establish comparisons through the ‘overlap’, a technique which has stemmed from an ongoing period of archival research, traversing multiple archives to map a wider context. I began to see examples where different photographers have separately photographed the same subject, landmark, theme, landscape, event or even people. This allowed for a method of close comparison, therefore analysis of differences, or similarities, in framing, composition or intention.

Whilst my ongoing research is centred on 13 early 20th-century women social documentary photographers and filmmakers in Scotland, in particular this article makes reference to Mary Ethel Muir Donaldson (1876–1958), Violet Banks (1886–1985) and Margaret Fay Shaw (1903–2004). I identify instances where their work ‘overlaps’ with each other’s, with their male peers’, or with the photography of the islanders themselves, in order to further assess the distinctiveness of ‘gaze’ from a perspective of gender and class.

This article is from a paper given at the Second Morton Photography Symposium which took place 29 October 2020. The symposium, entitled ‘Ways of Seeing: Women and Photography in Scotland' was inspired by the National Trust for Scotland’s major photographic collections, which feature many women as takers, collectors, preservers or subjects of photography. The symposium was in partnership with Glasgow Women's Library. The issue that this article appears in, Studies in Photography, draws together all the papers from the symposium's proceedings.