The Maker's Table: Nina Davidson
French photographer · based in Scotland · open for commission.
There’s a kind of photograph you only get when the person behind the camera isn’t trying to perform photography — they’re just trying to notice. A child running through ferns. A pony seen from a stable door. Two girls bending over a flower in a field of dry grass. Nina Davidson takes that kind of photograph, and there is nobody else in Scotland whose work captures the texture of this country quite the way hers does.
Nina is French. She came to Scotland for a summer when she was twenty-two, took a café job in Edinburgh, fell for a man whose office was across the street, moved in with him two months later, and never went back. “I never moved back to France,” is how she puts it. She ran a bistro in the old neighbourhood for ten years. She has four daughters — Ada, Colette, Nico, and baby Stella — and the family is, you sense from her work, both the foundation and the favourite subject.
For me, it is a way of focusing on the good things, the little snippets in life, the beautiful moments I share with my family.
That’s how Nina describes her own photography on her website. “I make a point to print my family photos so there is an analogue feel and touchable object.” That instinct — for slowness, for the made object, for the moment that matters — runs through everything she shoots. Her aesthetic is cinematic without being staged, painterly without being precious, often in soft natural light or black and white, with a strong sense of season and place.
There is a stillness in the images that is, I think, distinctly hers. It is photography in the tradition of Sally Mann and Rinko Kawauchi — the great editorial photographers who understand that the best images are not constructed but caught.
She has just published a children’s cookery book in France. Her lookbooks and campaigns have appeared for niche children’s and family clothing labels including Fish and Kids, Bombolla Studio, and Little Miss. Beyond commercial work, she also has a long-running personal project documenting her own family — her four daughters, growing up in Scotland — and it’s that intimacy with her own children that gives her commercial photography of children its distinct quality. The brand work doesn’t feel like brand work, because she’s not switching modes when she picks up the camera. She is, simply, photographing childhood.
She takes on a small number of commissions each year — brand storytelling, editorial, family documentation. If you’ve been thinking about working with a photographer whose images last, and whose images are made to be lived with rather than scrolled past, she is exactly the right person to write to.
See Nina’s work at ninadavidson.com or on Instagram @ninadavidson_. Commission enquiries: hello@ninadavidson.com.
From The Scullery
Letters from the Scullery is a bi-monthly publication from The Scullery at Ladhope Farmhouse, a boutique one-bedroom cottage in the Yarrow Valley, Scottish Borders. Join the Inner Circle at the-scullery.com for early access to dates and Inner Circle rates on midweek stays.