John R Hume is Scotland’s foremost expert on industrial heritage. John’s greatest passion was – and is – industry. Over the course of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, he took over 25,000 photographs of late-industrial and post-industrial Scotland. His collection is a remarkable portrait of a way of life that has now all but vanished. His drive to act as a witness to Scotland’s industrial empire, and its steady disintegration, took him to every corner of the country.
John’s photography produces an exhaustive and objective record. Yet it also reveals remarkable and poignant glimpses of domestic life – children playing in factory ruins, high-rises emerging on the city skylines, working men and women dwarfed by the incredible scale of an already crumbling industrial infrastructure.
In A Life of Industry, author Daniel Gray tells John’s story, and the story of what has been lost – and preserved.
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‘Looking deeper into each image reveals a poignant glimpse into the lives of the people intertwined with the bricks and mortar’
" - Sunday Post
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'This emotional and personal link to bricks and slate and steel is at the heart of Hume’s philosophy'
" - The Herald
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'a simply magnificent book: a book that should be considered essential reading/viewing by anyone who lives in or visits Scotland and has the slightest interest in how what they see around themselves came to be; and what went before'
" - Undiscovered Scotland
