Philip Braham studied photography under Joseph McKenzie at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, from 1977-80. His was a socially aware documentary practice and Joe’s passion for the truth of the medium had a profound effect on Braham.
On graduating, Braham moved to The Hague to study at the Royal Academy of Art, and there he was mentored by Alston Purvis, a former student of Walker Evans, and so the interest in documentary photography continued and developed.
In 2002, Braham purchased a 6 x 9 cm Fujifilm camera to make large scale prints of landscapes illuminated by using the full moon to reflect sunlight onto the land at night. The images captured events in real time, like ships or aeroplanes moving across the frame, but the long exposures also captured deep time through the varying colours of the star trails. As the universe expands, light stretches towards the red end of the spectrum, and this is visible on the large-scale prints. The series was titled Different Histories of Light, and The Photographer’s Gallery in London kept a portfolio in their sales gallery for five years.
In 2008, Braham began a series titled Suicide Notes that documented sites in Scotland where people had taken their own lives, based on stories that had appeared in newspapers at that time. Scotland has the highest rate of suicide in Europe, after Finland, and the series was intended to both act as a memorial and to bring greater awareness to these sad circumstances. The series was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy during the Edinburgh Festival in 2010, and the 21 photographs were purchased by the MT Assaf Collection in Beirut.
Braham won the RSA Morton Award for Lens Based Work in 2009, and the award enabled the production of the series Falling Shadows in Arcadia, in which ghostly figures inhabit the landscape, as a reminder of the brevity of human lives. One of the images entered the permanent collection of the Academy.
A move from Edinburgh to the rural town of Crieff in Perthshire brought a gentler focus on the landscape, and the recent work is more lyrical, and less to do with conceptual ideas. This turn has fed into his paintings too, and each discipline nourishes the other, and while the durational aspect of painting differs from the immediacy of the photograph, both are true expressions of being in a world in constant flux.