“Alex Boyd’s images represent a major addition to modern landscape photography.”
- Robert MacFarlane, Author
On the series The Point of the Deliverance (2023):
“A perfect marriage of technique and subject – gasp-worthy”
- Sally Mann, Acclaimed artist and Photographer
“Alex Boyd's atmospheric images from the wild edges of Scotland and Ireland tell a story of patience, tenacity—and complex human identity with the landscape.”
- Simon Ingram, National Geographic Magazine
“In these images the process announces itself. The ghostly smears and freckles, the loomingness of the landscapes”
- Kathleen Jamie, National Poet of Scotland
“Alex Boyd uses the archaic collodion process to create eerily timeless images.”
- The Scotsman Newspaper
“These photographs live long in the memory. This is altogether subtle, evocative, fascinating and spellbinding work.”
- Will Maclean, RSA
“At various points in his work, we seem to be cast forward to some point in the future, by which modernity will have become a distant source of morality tales, archetypes. The tale is a recent one, but the method of documentation, with its connotations of great age, grants it the same patina of myth as photographs reflecting more timeworn stories of struggle. There is certainly an illustrative quality of ghostliness, of melancholy, even of a lurking evil to some of these pictures: the trace of something ancient, disruptive of our normal sense of the world.”
- Greg Thomas, The British Journal of Photography
“Boyd creates dark elemental portraits of landscape.”
- Duncan Macmillan HRSA, The Scotsman
“To refer to the work of an artist as ‘visionary’ may seem disingenuous. However in the case of Alex Boyd’s perceptive and innovative work - justifiable.”
- Murray Robertson, SOGO Magazine
“I find the combination of photographer, hundred weight camera and subject matter felicitous.”
- Jonathan Meades, writer, critic, and BBC arts documentary writer.
On The Isle of Rust (2018):
“An affectionate but by no means nostalgic or romanticised view of one of Europe’s furthest edges.”
- John McDougall, Bella Caledonia
“Boyd is an equal opportunities photographer, one who refuses to discriminate based on conventional ideas of what is ‘worth’ documenting and what is not.”
- ROGER COX, The Scotsman
On St Kilda – The Silent Islands (2017):
“Alex Boyd captures the natural beauty magnificently, while his studies of radar stations and other signs of the islands’ military presence reveal another side to this captivating place.”
– The Royal Photographic Society
“Alex Boyd is not afraid to document the scars of landscape, delivering an incredible sense of place.”
- Tracy Calder (Review of St Kilda), AP Magazine, December 2018
“In these photographs Alex Boyd adds another layer of visual exploration to this island group, not simply through his extraordinary ability to use the camera as a tool of aesthetic discovery but through his keen sense of the cultural and geological paradoxes of this place. Not least of those paradoxes is that St Kilda found thousands of years of continuous habitation unsustainable in the first part of the twentieth century, to be replaced only by the military shift patterns of the Cold War. It is interesting to note that Boyd’s work is literally in the tradition of that great seer of cultural landscape, Fay Godwin for many of these photographs were taken with a camera which was once in her possession. Alex Boyd is a worthy successor.”
- Professor Murdo Macdonald, RSA
On Tir an Airm (The Land of the Military) (2019):
“In documenting the unseen weapon ranges of Scotland, photographer Alex Boyd described these as ‘lunar landscapes’ littered with wreckage and debris, supporting biodiversity but also contaminated and contorted. His project Tìr An Airm (Land of the Military), is a startling evocation of the rusting, bewitching relics from the bombing ranges of Cape Wrath to infantry training areas of Kirkcudbright. Pocked crater-covered slopes, abandoned training dummies lying as if dead and thistle-choked tanks are monuments to military endeavours over the last century, staged on moors, grassland and cliff tops.”
- Kat Hill, excerpt from Bothy - Simple Shelter, Harper Reach. 2024.
“In Boyd’s photography, one detects shapes that look like dark circles from afar. The violence that preceded them feels abstract; that moment at which each circle emerged, following an explosion that catapulted intricate ecosystems up in the air, as pre-existing structures burst and animals, plants, and soil were blown up. Traces of past centuries suddenly exposed to particles, oxygen, and pollution of this present moment, the so-called Anthropocene. The age of man. In these moments timelines collide, opening a window into deep, geologic time, encouraging a moment to reflect and reframe.”
- Dr Anna Dafferstofer, Looking North in Art, St Andrews University, 2023