Armed with a book instead of a guitar, Brian May, best known as the lead guitarist of the rock group Queen, is heading to the Edinburgh book festival to launch a lavishly illustrated biography of the Victorian Scottish photographer George Washington Wilson.
Wilson, now almost forgotten, was a star of his day. After photographing the construction of a new castle for Victoria and Albert at Balmoral, his startling images show how glaringly bright the new-build was, became the Queen’s official photographer in Scotland.
May, who has been collecting vintage photographs since his earliest days touring with the band, now owns one of the largest collections in the world of Victorian stereo photographs, double images which sprang into 3D life when seen through a special viewer. Surviving viewers are now rare and very expensive, so he had to design and manufacture modern versions in plastic to include with a series of books he has published from his collection, which also featured in an exhibition at Tate Britain in 2014.
He describes the new book as a “labour of love”, a tribute both to the photographer, and the text by his mentor Roger Taylor, confusingly not Queen’s drummer, but an expert on Victorian photography and Wilson’s work.
“I collected George Washington Wilson’s stereo cards over the years and have always been excited by his unique portrayal of Scottish landscape in the stereoscope,” May said.
Taylor said that in the mid-Victorian period Wilson was a household name. “Above all he was universally acknowledged as a leading exponent of stereoscopic photography, a fashionable craze which fired up hearts and imagination throughout the nation.”
In his early years as a landscape photographer, Wilson walked miles across mountain sides carrying his heavy equipment and setting up his studio in a tent, something he blamed for his later poor health.
His success led him to construct what was described as the most advanced purpose-built photographic centre in the world, near his home in Aberdeen. When it was gutted by fire in 1882 Victoria sent a telegram of sympathy from Balmoral. He retired in the late 1880s, leaving his sons to take over the business, and died in 1893.
May’s appearance at the book festival is likely to be a slightly more decorous affair than when Queen played Edinburgh in 1982. The hall was so packed and hot that Freddie Mercury helpfully poured some beer over the sweaty front rows, commenting: “I didn’t know this was gonna be a bath house.”
- George Washington Wilson, by Prof Roger Taylor, introduction by Brian May, published by the London Stereoscopic Company on 15 August
