“I photograph the world at the edge of recognition, where the everyday slips into something quieter and more surreal.”
Bio
Robby Ogilvie (b.1986, Edinburgh) is a photographer and lens based artist based in Scotland, exploring perception, place and the shifting boundaries between clarity and ambiguity. His work moves between conceptual and post documentary photography, working across digital, analogue and mobile formats, with a focus on everyday environments where structure, colour and light begin to slip into something more surreal.
He holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory (Distinction) from Edinburgh College of Art, where his studies informed an ongoing interest in perception, attention and the conditions through which images are experienced.
He is the winner of the 2026 Sony World Photography Awards, Open Competition, Object category, for his image Colour Divides, and was also recognised as a finalist in the National Geographic Traveller UK Photography Competition. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Somerset House, London, the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, and Old Mill, Belgrade, Serbia. Forthcoming exhibitions include Den Internationale – no. 43, Esbjerg, Denmark, Venice Photo Lab, and the Saatchi Gallery, London, as part of Digitalism Vol. 3 at the British Art Fair.
His work has been published internationally in The Guardian (UK), NOICE Magazine (USA), Ephemere (Tokyo), BROAD Magazine (Canada), Woofer Magazine (USA), and SOFT Publishing (Italy), contributing to a growing global presence.
Alongside his photographic practice, Ogilvie has a background in design, having worked as a User Experience (UX) and product design specialist. This experience informs a considered approach to composition, sequencing and visual systems, where attention and perception are central.
He actively self publishes artist books and zines, including Intervals: Vol.01, COURTS, and the Spirit of Place series.
He lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Artist Statement
I photograph the world at the edge of recognition, where the everyday slips into something quieter and more surreal.
My practice explores perception as an active and unstable process, shaped by attention, atmosphere and the quiet thresholds where the familiar begins to feel slightly uneasy. The work sits between conceptual and post documentary photography. I am interested in moments when clarity softens and meaning becomes provisional, allowing feeling to surface before interpretation.
I work between sustained observation and instinctive responsiveness. Some images emerge slowly through repeated encounters with the same places. Others are made quickly, in response to fleeting situations that cannot be returned to. Both approaches are guided by attentiveness to mood, rhythm and timing, and by a sensitivity to when a moment asks to be waited for and when it asks to be met.
I work across digital, analogue and mobile formats. The mobile phone is particularly important to me as an immediate and democratic tool, one that challenges hierarchies within photography and reflects the permeability of contemporary experience. In a culture saturated with images, I am interested in how photographs both mediate and destabilise reality, holding belief, projection and ambiguity at once. Rather than adding to this constant flow, the work often moves in the opposite direction, slowing things down and creating space for a different kind of attention.
My way of seeing and feeling is informed in part by lived experience of keratoconus, a degenerative eye condition that alters brightness, depth and form, and by derealisation, in which the world can feel distant or unreal. These experiences heighten my awareness of how fragile perception can be, encouraging a practice that works with instability rather than correcting it.
Across projects, I return to themes of presence and absence, belief, solitude and the tension between belonging and distance. At its core, the work asks how we orient ourselves emotionally within spaces that feel both familiar and estranged.
Photography, for me, is not a means of resolution but a way of holding attention. The images act as quiet interruptions, inviting a slower, more reflective encounter with the world as it is felt rather than simply seen.