The Scottish Radiance Book Shelf

Shades of Scotland 1956 - 1988
Photographs by Oscar Marzaroli and words by James Grassie

This is no ordinary book of photographs. For 39 years Oscar Marzaroli stride across Scotland's rural and urban landscape, still camera always ready. No corner of the land nor any activity on it, from the Out Skerries in turbulent seas east of Shetland to the rolling hills of the Borders, escaped his eye. Fisherman and boat builders, farmers and weavers, oil workers and crofters, all were his subjects, and many became friends.

That journey is the focus of this book. Scotland's family, in its triumphs and tragedies, inhabits its pages, which are lit by its character and humour.

Marzaroli was optimist about Scots and their ability to improve their condition. People at work, at play, troubled, happy, consequently dominate his photographs.

Broad sweeps of land and sea provide much of the background. But he much preferred to in close, to capture the moment - the moment when fisherman hauled in the net, farm workers hoed the drills, crofters sheared their sheep or hunters caught the deer in telescopes. As his much praised and successful "Shades of Grey" demonstrates, he was not stranger to city streets. But even there it was the people living and working in them that drew him. He was as much at home in Aberdeen or Glasgow, Edinburgh or Dundee as he was on the lonely stretches of Rannoch Moor, the thickly populated winter slopes of Cairnigrom, or the quiet beaches of Harris.

Through it all he eschewed the falsely sentimental Brigadoon myths, encrusted with heather. He believed that if he could seize the truth. Its impact would be more powerful, more romantic and more authentic than any story ever told in tartan. The result is a remarkable range of work, in subject as well as mood. Marzaroli died in 1988, leaving a major archive which, in the years ahead will be come a lasting tribute to the man and an enduring record of the land people he loved.

Art * 9 x 12 in * 224 pp * 284 b/w photographs * ISBN 1 85158 213 4

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