David Bruce

David Bruce is a former Director of the Scottish Film Council and the Edinburgh International Film Festival. A historian of film and photography, he is the author of The Sun Pictures – the Hill-Adamson Calotypes; Edinburgh Past and Present (with Maurice Lindsay); and Scotland – the Movie and has contributed widely to other publications. He is a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and convenor of the Scottish Society for the History of Photography.

His interest in John Henry Greatrex was triggered by a lecture given by Dr Sara Stevenson, then Senior Curator of Photography in the National Galleries of Scotland, who made reference to a Glasgow photographer who had resorted to ‘printing his own money’. The resulting hunt for Greatrex lead to fascinating revelations not only about a colourful criminal career but about Victorian photography and forgery, crime and punishment, in England, Scotland, Australia and the USA.