Photography Competition Puts Aberdeen Communities in the Spotlight
Winners range from a lit bus shelter in the suburbs to Tillydrone tower blocks at night.
The winning image in the Young People’s category is a bus shelter. It sits alone in the dark, lit from inside, a Pepsi advert on the side panel. Nobody’s waiting. Andrew Gall called it Artery – make of the title what you will. It’s a more interesting answer to the brief than most adults would have thought to give.
That brief asked photographers to interpret “spotlight” - literally or metaphorically - as a way of representing community in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire. The Entering the Spotlight competition, run by Aberdeen Arts Centre in partnership with NESCol, drew entries from across Scotland, and the range of what people came back with is worth paying attention to.
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What the pictures actually show
Samantha Mackie’s The Take Down won the Adult category. It shows a young boy in a school jumper, sitting on a dry stone wall with his back to the camera, watching an orange digger at work. It’s composed and patient, the kind of shot that requires you to notice something before anyone else does.
Second place went to Craig Allison’s Natural Spotlight, which earns its title: mountain bikers in a pine forest, shafts of sunlight breaking through the mist at an angle that looks almost deliberate. Third was Anastasiia Gladkova’s photograph of four children behind a fundraising stall, arms raised, the Archie Foundation banner behind them and granite tenements beyond that.
In the Young People’s category, Julia Mae Gunn placed both second and third, with two entirely different kinds of image. The Cornerstone is a black-and-white architectural study of a granite building on Ogilvie Street, shot from low down with a dramatic sky overhead. On the Wall is a tortoiseshell cat on a harbour wall, looking out to sea. That she placed twice in the same competition, with images that share almost nothing in approach, is worth noting.
The NESCol student category produced some of the most considered work. Liga Bazenova’s Tillydrone High-Rise Towers, the category winner, is a shot of a tower block at night, windows glowing in orange and blue against a black sky. It treats a building that often gets ignored as something worth looking at properly. Lydia Scollay’s Pride came second, capturing Aberdeen’s Pride march, flags and crowds outside the granite facade of a civic building. Tetiana Ohar placed third with Tall Ships Races, the fleet visible on the horizon behind waves breaking over a groyne.
Where the competition came from
The idea grew out of Aberdeen Arts Centre’s Save campaign, which launched in May 2025 and has raised over £158,000 to secure the venue’s future. The response to that campaign, the number of people who felt strongly enough to act, became the starting point for asking what community looks like to the people who live here.
The exhibition is in the corridor space at Aberdeen Arts Centre on King Street, and is open now.
