“I photograph the world at the edge of recognition, where the everyday slips into something quieter and more surreal.”
Bio
Robby Ogilvie (born in Edinburgh, 1986) is an award winning photographer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His work explores perception, place and belonging through a lens based practice that moves between conceptual and post documentary approaches. Working across digital, analogue and mobile formats, he is interested in the unstable threshold between clarity and ambiguity, and the quiet atmospheres that shape contemporary life.
He holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Edinburgh College of Art, which informs the conceptual framework underpinning his work.
In 2026 he won the Sony World Photography Awards Open Competition, Category Object, for his image Colour Divides, exhibited at Somerset House, London. He is also a Global Award winner in the RED collaboration between i-D Magazine and Ray-Ban. His work has been exhibited internationally, including in London, Venice and Belgrade, and nationally at the Royal Scottish Academy. His photographs have been published by Soft Publishing, BROAD and Woofer Magazine.
Ogilvie self publishes artist books and zines, including INTERVALS: VOL 01, COURTS, and the Spirit of Place series.
Artist Statement
I photograph the world at the edge of recognition, where the everyday slips into something quieter and more uncertain.
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 somewhere 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.
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 staying with uncertainty, offering images as spaces for pause, attentiveness and shared reflection.