Alistair Peebles's story about Stone Built

We moved from Edinburgh to Orkney in the mid-80s. We’d never been before and all I really knew about it was George Mackay Brown’s work, and Stone Built, a slim, softcover book of striking black and white photographs, mostly of Orkney, by the Swedish artist Gunnie Moberg. I’d borrowed it several times from George IV Bridge Library, the shelf-school where I learned about photography. I finally got hold of a copy, from the US, two years ago. That was about six months before Gunnie died, much too early.

Over those years I’d got to know her – beautiful, hospitable, graceful, unpretentious, caring, funny, indefatigable, gifted, well-loved Gunnie – and Tam, her husband. (If this comment were to have been about a bookshop rather than a book that changed my life it would be Stromness Books and Prints – his shop, whose imprint this book carries. Published in 1979, it’s the only one.)

Most of the places depicted I got to know quite quickly. Few from the perspective that Gunnie often used – from the air – though I’ve always been aware, as I’ve looked at these scenes, how she’d seen them. As I learned later, she came to photography more or less accidentally, mixing journalism with landscape and portraiture, but it was an aerial shot of a downed American fighter plane, somewhere off Shetland, that first made her name.

Because she had a friend who was an inter-island pilot, she was often airborne at low altitude, and made the most of the chance to accumulate dramatic, tightly-composed shots of places like the Knap of Howar, Cubbie Roo’s Castle, the Barriers and a tidal sheep fort, now swept away. While I couldn’t have known this when I first opened the book, these examples illustrate how visibly present in the landscape are signs of occupation from more than 5,000 years. All, of course, stone built.

Nor could I have known how unusual it was to have these islands, “sleeping whales” as her friend GMB called them, represented from the air in close-up detail. The overlapping lines of dykes, paths, rocks and buildings become suddenly distinct, both smaller and bigger, and organised in a way that seems definitive, and indeed is just that, in spite of more recent alterations and the fact that like any landscape photography it’s all about contingencies of light, weather, viewpoint and distance.

There are 18 plates, one per double-page spread, with a title and brief caption over on the left, images full-bleed on the right. I like this layout in a photographic book, if there have to be words. The printing is contrasty, pretty basic really; the paper stock is hard-wearing. In its durable, unpretentious, energetic way it’s perfect. We now have a couple of framed prints from the set, and they are delicately toned, full of surprises and perfect too.

I also remember liking the MacDiarmid epigraph, the Scottishness of it, and the intriguing name, Gunnie Moberg. It was as exotic as the images, perfect for her.