By the time you’re done with Edinburgh art festival you’ll have uncovered so many hidden stories you’ll feel like Columbo. We’re talking queer narratives, secret histories, undiscovered archives: the whole festival is a celebration of the underground and unheralded. You can’t walk into a gallery without learning about some subcultural genius or longlost creative you’ve never heard of.
That’s not a bad MO for a city-wide art festival. But EAF is also a big, unwieldy, confusing thing. There are curated displays, satellite exhibitions, performances, off-site projects, and it’s impossible to figure out how any of it fits together.
You’ve just got to follow your nose and hope you sniff out something you like. And you’d better like photography, because there’s a lot of it here. The whole thing starts with US photographer Del LaGrace Volcano, whose images of queer nightlife in 1980s London are great: intimate, confrontational, erotic, totally defiant, as are the images of lesbian goths draping themselves over tombstones in Edinburgh graveyards.
They’re insights into properly underground, subcultural life in the 1980s and 90s. Plenty of the photos aren’t all that good, but this feels like an artist who should be gathering a lot more attention, dealing with themes that have been all over the art and museum world recently. When it comes to untold stories, that of Sandra George (1957-2013) is worth telling.
She was a black photographer and photojournalist who documented life on the margins of inner city Edinburgh. Like a lot of people in EAF, she never showed her work publicly in her lifetime, and was only discovered after her death in 2013. From her unique perspective as a semi-outsider, she documented communities in the city’s impoverished Craigmillar area.
She captured protests and action groups operating out of living rooms and town halls; people living in hostels and housing schemes, skinheads, labourers, Hare Krishnas, Indians, Jamaicans, white and black. She appears throughout her show at City Art Gallery in self-portraits, often with her young son. There are kids everywhere, always playing and laughing, often in desperately bleak places.
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