2012 Studio Portraits Film
I shot this during the festival in 2012, I had recently built the glass brick wall in my studio and wanted to make some portraits using its defused light. I got as many people in as I could, I think I probably only got about a third of the people that were involved in the fringe that year. Some famous faces amongst some old friends. Video not loading? Click here.
Peter Dibdin
Peter Dibdin is a photographer and Summerhall resident. His work includes photography for theatre and performance, portraits, food & drink and location photography. As well as undertaking commissions, he initiates his own projects, most recently collaborating with his writer brother Thom to mark the absence of the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe on a series called Nothing to Review Here.
Pete has been photographing Summerhall since the beginning, knows the building as well as anyone, and has literally thousands of unseen images of Summerhall and people who have visited it. We invited him to choose a few pictures to give a sense of (some of) the people and happenings over the last 10 years.
I was one of the first residents to move in to Summerhall, when the place was locked up at 5pm and the only way of getting out was to put a dustbin lid in-front of the big gates, opening them up as if by magic. One time I was locked inside the Small Animal Hospital (which is ironically now home to escape room centre Locked in Edinburgh), with only a carcass bin as company and a dying phone.
From the start I began to document the place. To do it properly would be a full-time job, so most of my images are the things that interested me or I was specifically asked to shoot.
The images here are just a selection of the images I have taken over the years, starting first with a film of over two hundred and fifty portraits of some of the people involved with the 2012 Fringe at Summerhall, shot in my studio.
The most recent is a a shot of the Daybreak team during lockdown, taken as part of a series of images I made of some of Summerhall’s residents and staff who adapted to the pandemic restrictions in 2020.
These images reflect not only the breadth of the talent who have visited Summerhall over the years, but also the extraordinary community and talent that we have here in the residents.
Summerhall has been my saviour, every day I am thankful for my studio, but that is not to say it doesn’t have its quirks! During lockdown it has been a rock, allowing me to have a daily routine away from home and also meaning I could carry on working.
