Vintage Tractors
Featuring:
Over 70 images of vintage tractors by Scottish photographer, Allan Wright
New work from Scottish poet, George Gunn
Personal reflections of retired Ayrshire farmer, Russell McNab
AWARD-winning photographer, Allan Wright, is intent on capturing a lost army; an army, that is, of largely abandoned vintage tractors.
Roaming Scotland’s stunning coastal and rural landscape, with lens at the ready, Wright takes us on an unusual journey of discovery that reflects on the role of the tractor and on how it has shaped Scotland’s agricultural history, heritage and landscape.
Featuring award-winning Scottish poet, George Gunn, and retired farmer and tractor enthusiast, Ayrshireman, Russell McNab, this unique book celebrates the role of the tractor in ‘making life possible’.
Visitors to Scotland, walkers, farmers, crofters and their families, plus historians and lovers of vintage machinery, will all find much to enjoy – as will thousands of tractor buffs whose enduring fascination for all things mechanical knows no bounds.
Allan Wright has been a professional photographer since the 1980s.
He says: “My principle occupation is as a landscape photographer, but during my working travels I unwittingly developed a particularly sharp eye for a tractor, abandoned or partially obscured at the back of a barn or in the far distant corner of a field. I felt a strange magnetic draw each time I encountered one of these ‘noble beasts’.”
Widely-travelled across the globe, Wright is renowned for his ability to capture the variant moods and lyricism of his native Scotland’s landscape.
As Vintage Tractors clearly demonstrates, he relishes “zeroing in on the moment, to capture that extra-special shot”.
And on tractors, he says: “With some imagination, there can be true poetry in each of their journeys, as very slowly over years, these ‘beasts’ are quietly absorbed back into the land they have worked all their life.”
George Gunn: Caithness poet
“… through them life was made possible as was belief that these hard acres could provide.”
A key feature is new work by celebrated poet George Gunn that Allan Wright specially commissioned for his book.
Gunn is renowned for his ability to encompass many contrasting aspects of Scottish culture. His poetic masterpiece, which explores the tractors’ legacy, features on the book’s centre pages and is a perfect conduit to the land and to the agricultural heritage of rural Scotland. It strikes like a thunderbolt.
Russell McNab: – retired Ayrshire farmer
“As with people, the older tractors get the more interesting they become.”
Tractor enthusiast and long-time stalwart of the Ayrshire Tractor and Machinery Club, Russell McNab contributes his vivid personal memories of tractor ownership.
His impressive knowledge and passion for tractors and his amusing anecdotes will entertain anyone who may have had or maybe still has an ancient machine working their fields or hiding in a shed, a wood – or a bog!
More Kitchen Table than Coffee Table?
A Massey Ferguson FE 35, a four-cylinder Ferguson TE 20, and a Zetor 3013 , a David Brown 880 Selectamatic, or a Nuffield 10/60 – you can smell the diesel…
All the featured tractors are courageously identified by McNab.
Readers can have fun guessing the identity of each model before consulting the list at the back of the book!
Vintage Tractors
Published: 15 April 2019
Allan Wright Photographic / Lomond Books Ltd.
Paperback £9.99
www.scottishbookstore.com
For more information / high-res photographs / interviews – please contact Carol Carr PR: carolcarrpr@gmail.com / T: 01450 870 844 / M: 07766 754 87
Notes for editors:
Additional information
Vintage Tractors is one of two new books by Allan Wright.
Also published today:
Scotland’s Islands
By: Award-winning Scottish photographer: Allan Wright
160 glorious pages of stunning landscape photography
Introduction by The Herald’s books editor and journalist, Marianne Taylor, with her own reflections on travelling throughout Scotland’s islands.
Scotland’s Islands – a visual odyssey
Allan’s renowned ability to evoke the unique spirit of the land and those who inhabit it – wherever he goes – is powerfully illustrated in his latest stunning publication: Scotland’s Islands.
Published: 15 April 2019
Allan Wright Photographic / Lomond Books Ltd.
Paperback: £11.99
Buy online: www.scottishbookstore.com
And: www.allanwrightphoto.com
Current publications include:
Skye (2nd also edition out 15 April), Galloway, Now Glasgow, Arran 60 Best Views, Mull & Iona, Perthshire (AND: Currently out of print: Edinburgh Glasgow, West Coast, Arran )
ENDS
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