AFTER THE FESTIVAL ...

As to the Festival's potential legacy, it can be described in a number of ways. The most obvious and practical is the Schools’ Resource Pack which, with luck, will be in use across the nation for years to come. Publications prompted or generated by the Festival will have an even longer life-span, notably Dr Sara Stevenson's definitive work, The Personal Art of David Octavius Hill, but also the local publications and maps and the papers from the international conference.

Less tangibly, but possibly even more significant, the Festival has obviously raised consciousness of the importance of Scottish photography at a crucial moment in our cultural history when plans are actively being made to create a Scottish National Centre for Photography (opens in new window). The Festival and the Year of Photography have, in effect, helped to establish a platform for this immensely important initiative.

But these are grand matters to do with institutions, agencies, politics and national ambition. Maybe the success of the D O Hill Bicentenary Festival really resides at a much more personal and private level. If, as we believe, the Festival has provided the opportunity for thousands of individual people, especially children, to experience revelation and to change thinking about our past and our potential, which they would not otherwise have been enabled to do, then all the effort has been tremendously worthwhile.