A photobook reflecting on ecological restoration, light and slow transformation within a remote Highland landscape.
Gathering Light is a photobook by British photographer Sam Laughlin, bringing together work made during a six-week stay in the Southern Uplands of Scotland, where he lived in conditions disconnected from the power grid and surrounding infrastructure. The project was developed in response to a landscape undergoing ecological restoration. In a region with one of the lowest proportions of native woodland on the Scottish mainland, Borders Forest Trust has planted more than two million native trees across 31 square kilometres. Against the backdrop of this large-scale environmental recovery, Laughlin’s work quietly attends to other forms of change unfolding there across different physical and temporal scales.
As the northern light accumulated and was absorbed and stored by the growing trees, Laughlin began to sense an affinity between photography and photosynthesis. Watching the arc of the sun rise day by day toward the height of the summer solstice, he immersed himself in the ancient summer light released at night from the embers of a fallen ash tree. The resulting work is marked by stillness, attentiveness and a heightened awareness of light as both material and metaphor.
Limited edition of 300 copies. Includes a signed print by the artist.
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Title: Gathering Light
Artist: Sam Laughlin
Publisher: Jane & Jeremy, 2025
Format: Foiled hardcover with signed tipped-in print
Size: 145 × 200 mm
Pages: 104
Language: English
Edition: First edition of 300 copies, hand-numbered
ISBN: 978-1-9192612-2-5
