Artist Talk: Reflecting An Industrial Past

A photographer and cameraman based in Dunblane, Tom Astbury’s career began in the 1970’s in his home city of Manchester, where he worked commercially as a photographer and exhibited with a collective based in the city’s Grassroots Bookshop.

Moving to Scotland in the late ‘70’s, Tom worked for Falkirk Museum before becoming a successful cameraman in film and television.

A recent return to his photographic roots resulted in an exhibition of ‘dùthchas’, a small landscape series of black and white images, in 2017.

Now Tom is re-engaging with his Falkirk work, which documented the decline in traditional iron founding, brickmaking and clay mining. Much of this work, preserved in the Falkirk Archive, has remained largely unseen.

Tom will introduce his project to document these traditional industries around Central Scotland, which were fast disappearing whilst he was working locally from 1979-82.

He will talk about his photographic approach to documenting what he saw and his intention to reflect both the workplaces and the workers in the pictures.

Throughout August as part of our Reflect 2023 festival, Tom will be exhibiting a selection of photographs from his collection, documenting Falkirk's fast disappearing industry from 1979-82.

On the day of the talk a selection of photo books from Tom's personal collection will be available for folks to drop by and look through whilst viewing the exhibition.