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Every photographer has, at some point, blamed their gear. The lens wasn't sharp enough, the sensor too noisy, the light too flat. It's comforting, but it falls apart entirely when you look at the work of John D Rattar (1876-1957) – the Shetland joiner-turned-photographer whose 150th anniversary is being marked this month with a major exhibition.
Rattar, whose earliest known photographs date back to 1890-92, was entirely self-taught. He worked with equipment that would look laughably basic by today's standards, in an era when a single exposure demanded patience most of us have long since outsourced to burst mode.
And yet A Time to Keep, which opened this weekend at Shetland Museum and Archives in Scotland, shows a body of work so alert to composition, light and moment that it still stops visitors in their tracks.
The exhibition, curated by exhibitions officer Karen Clubb and senior curator of collections Carol Christiansen, moves away from a chronological retelling of Rattar's career and instead groups the work thematically: land, sea, work, play, textiles and historic events.
For anyone who photographs for a living or a hobby, it's not just a history lesson but also a masterclass in resourcefulness.
Whatever the picture needed
Here's the detail worth dwelling on: Rattar routinely carried a small boat in his car so he could reach remote lochs and shoot landscapes from angles nobody else could get to. No drone, no telephoto zoom to fake the distance, just a man prepared to physically relocate himself to wherever the picture demanded.
He climbed to precarious cliff edges at Noss for nesting seabirds, rowed into the caves of Papa Stour and travelled to Mousa to document the wreck of the Sunniva. The picture always came before the comfort.
It's a useful lesson for anyone who's ever talked themselves out of a shoot because the weather looked uncertain or the walk-in was too far.
Rattar's landscapes and wildlife studies, including a strikingly composed eider duck nest and a hand cradling a catch of tiny fish, share a quality that's hard to manufacture: he was clearly right there, on the ground, waiting.
A sense of restraint
What comes through most strongly in the selected images is Rattar's restraint. His portraits, whether of fishermen, croft workers or a model maker bent over the hull of a half-built boat, feel observed rather than arranged.
Christiansen points out that some of the subjects remain unidentified, which only adds to the sense that Rattar was documenting rather than staging. He photographed life as it happened to be, not as it might look better rearranged.
That instinct extended to his subject matter, too. Rattar moved without apparent hesitation between a hatching bird and a bomb crater, between herring drifters under sail and the quiet domestic ritual of a woman tending sheep's puddings on a stove.
Nothing was beneath his attention and nothing seems to have been forced into a frame it didn't belong in.
For photographers used to chasing gear upgrades as a substitute for graft, A Time to Keep is a gentle rebuke.
Rattar's tools were modest; his patience and curiosity were not. It didn't stop him building a proper business, either, selling mounted prints, postcards, calendars and souvenir packs that carried his work into homes across Shetland and, through reproductions and publications, well beyond it.
A Time to Keep runs at Shetland Museum and Archives in Lerwick, Shetland, Scotland until Sunday, October 11.
Staged in the Gadderie's newly darkened space, with a reconstructed bird hide complete with recorded birdsong, it's as much about atmosphere as artefact, making it well worth a visit. And while you're there, you'll get a useful reminder that the best accessory in your bag has never been the one you can buy.
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We can't really recommend a boat (or a car in which to put it), but if you want to master reportage and documentary then take a look at the best cameras for street photography and the best street photography lenses.
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