Over the course of five years, the photographer travelled to Highland Games editions across Scotland and the USA, taking hundreds of photographs in the process. Now, several of them are presented in his recently published photobook Long Walk Home. Broken up into two parts, the first book focuses on photography taken live at the sporting events. Often cropped up close in the midst of action, there’s a timeless grain to many of the shots, which feel as if they could have been snapped at any point over the previous century given an absence of markers of the modern age.
Focusing on the three main pillars of the Games – sport, music and dance – they are also difficult to place geographically, despite the prevalence of tartan and traditional Scottish attire throughout. “My initial worry with going to America was that the pictures would stand out,” Lawrence says. “But what was really interesting while I was making the work was the odd similarities in terms of landscape and characters.”
In the second book, studio portraits weave in and out of a reflective essay penned by writer and poet John Burnside. With models dressed in traditional garb, while re-enacting sporting acts or music-making, it provides an alternative vision of the games to the first, constructed entirely by the photographer and writer themselves, in their own versions of mythmaking. “John sadly passed away in the spring before the book came out,” says Lawrence. “A lot of it is linked to his own childhood experiences of [The Highland Games], and makes the text feel more pertinent, and links to my final conclusion that this was a community, child-like experience for people.”
