Scottish Symphony

Elizabeth H. Kaufman owned and operated a crafts gallery on the East Coast; she travelled the back roads of The British Isles.

Scottish Symphony is, first of all, an impressive book (14.25 x 10.25 inches) containing 62 large color images of the Hebrides Islands and Highlands of Scotland. The photographs are the work of Michael Ruetz, who is now working and living in Rome, in fulfillment of the Villa Massimo Award, given for the first time to a photographer. The Introduction was written by David Attenborough, the well-known naturalist and filmmaker. That Introduction and the Author’s Note add considerably to the enjoyment of the pictures that follow.

The original inspiration for the photographer’s pictorial journey was the well-chronicled records of a similar trip by James Boswell and Samuel Johnson in 1773, shortly after Scotland became accessible to such travellers. As Mr. Ruetz writes in his introductory note, Boswell’s journal is “one of the most entertaining [travel accounts] in the English language.” This photographic tribute commemorates the two hundredth anniversary of that literary landmark.

Ruetz was further inspired by two musical compositions by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who visited Scotland in the early 1830s and later composed the well-known Scottish Symphony and the overture The Hebrides (also known as Fingal’s Cave). A panoramic three-page fold-out, one of seven in the book, gives us an impressive view of the entrance to Fingal’s Cave on the coast of the Isle of Staffa. A remarkable formation of basalt pillars surrounds the opening, preventing entry except by boat (and that only in calm weather).

The photographs are notable for the absence of people. As a result, they may better capture the Scotland that Boswell and Johnson explored. Even today it seems an empty land in its more remote areas, and we find it easy to accept the loneliness and the peaceful, if wild and rugged, world in the photographs.

Any journey through the Scottish Highlands was a very real accomplishment in physical terms when it was made by Johnson and Boswell. Today, two centuries later, it is a privilege many of us can enjoy, whether in fact or in our favorite armchair.