“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 Scotland based award winning photographer and lens based artist 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 his work has been exhibited internationally. Recent exhibitions include the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh and Old Mill, Belgrade, Serbia. Forthcoming exhibitions include Somerset House, London; 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: Volume One, 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 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.