In the begining

I have been a bit paralysed by the choice of blip for today.  Reaching my 1000th seems to have unnerved me and by lunchtime I had taken quite a few photographs in various places but still  not found exactly what I wanted.

I decided to walk back from Cabinet and of course I hadn't got more than a few steps when drips of rain started, turning into a steady insistent drizzle by the time I was half way along Princes St.    So anything I was going to do was likely to be a bit grey.

I walked along by the back of Waverly station in order to go up Jeffrey St, and it was from there that I saw this.   It doesn't look all that spectacular, but I think it is appropriate for today, for me anyway , and in three ways :  political, educational and photographic.

It is, of course, the Old Royal High School built between 1826 and 1829.   The politics of it are obvious for it was to have been the site of the Scottish Assembly which was meant to have been set up after the 1979 devolution referendum.   Indeed the main hall was converted into a rather fine debating chamber but that Assembly never sat. It was the locus for more than a few demonstrations between 1979 and 1997 and its entrance was where the Vigil for the Scottish Parliament had its famous caravan for 1980 days.  The building was briefly considered for the new Parliament after 1997 but was (it was alleged)  too small and the site too constrained.  

The education connection is both local and national.  It was and is  a celebrated Edinburgh  school , now based out at Barnton and fully part of Edinburgh Council's provision but - the less well known part - it was  the Rector of the Royal High School who in 1847 in this very building  became the founding President of the Educational Institute of Scotland  at its first Annual general Meeting.  Last Saturday I became the first Education Minister to address such an AGM.

But the photographic connection is what clinched it.   For this was the building which was to become the Scottish National Photography Centre  to be established by a committee on which I sat for several years but which, in the end, couldn't raise the money needed to make it happen.  

That was a great pity particularly as the building was exactly the right building not just because of its size but because of its location.    Edinburgh's Calton Hill - on the side of which the Old Royal High School sits - can justly claim to be one of the  world's founding sites for the art and practice of photography.

The documentary photographers Hill & Adamson had their studio at Rock House, on the other side of the hill, in the 1840s and in the year that the EIS was being founded they were just coming to the end of that remarkable partnership which has left such an extraordinary legacy.   But the site went on being photographically significant with the Annan brothers occupying the same studio in the 1870s and with others using it too.

Blipfoto was of course founded in Edinburgh and is based there or rather in Newhaven which is, of course,  where Hill and Adamson immortalised the local fishwives in callotypes.

So a trinity of purposes in blipping this today and many thanks to all the blippers who have made the last three and a bit years such an enjoyable experience.   Those who started this did a great thing but like many great things it has become a  property more widely held and cherished.   Long may it continue to flourish.