Alicia Bruce

Courtesy of the artist.

Scottish activist and photographer Alicia Bruce has dedicated more than a decade to documenting the local community of Menie, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Her work often explores the collaborative relationship between photographer and sitter, while also engaging broader communities’ humanistic, social, and environmental concerns. Bruce’s book I Burn But I Am Not Consumed (2023) conveys the picturesque dunes and remote beauty of ancestral homelands that have become an unlikely, world-watched battleground between long-time community members and encroaching private development. This project addresses the sixteen-year-long struggle of a small Scottish community pitted against the US-based Trump family’s successful campaign to build a private golf course along a stretch of protected land—thus destroying the delicate ecosystem that had previously supported diverse plant and animal species. 

Bruce herself was born in Aberdeen, and she is a lecturer in photography at Stevenson College of Edinburgh, as well as an educator at the National Galleries of Scotland. Her photography is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), Chicago; National Galleries of Scotland; University St. Andrews Photography Collection, Scotland; and Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, United Kingdom, among others.