Gordon Farquhar’s photographic practice is rooted in a self-directed engagement with Scotland’s built and natural environments. Purposefully and deliberately eschewing formal institutional affiliation, Farquhar operates as an autodidact whose oeuvre testifies to a sustained visual inquiry: each image functions as both aesthetic artefact and archival datum within a self-curated, open-access repository located in Glasgow, yet resonant across variegated landscapes.Central to Farquhar’s approach is an implicit enactment of psychogeographical exploration, a methodology that privileges the experiential flux of place over cartographic determinism. Psychogeography describes the effect of geographical locales on one’s emotions and behaviour and encourages dérives - drifting wanderings unbound by preconceived itineraries. Through photographic dérives that extend from the urban core of Glasgow to the unloved, forgotten and unremarkably remarkable spaces inside the spaces, Farquhar’s lens traces the psychical contours of Scotland’s topography, revealing intimate imprints of both human industry and natural reclamation.Farquhar intentionally avoids a ‘poverty safari’ aesthetic or any documentation of suffering; his aim is not to sensationalise hardship but to uncover quiet marvels within everyday environments and to document the sadness of the left behind, or out of time. He often photographs subjects from three distinct vantage points - wide, close and texturised abstract - yet almost invariably presents them in a flat, face-on perspective, eschewing dramatic angles or deep focus for a deliberate neutrality that invites reflective viewing.The deliberate absence of human figures in Farquhar’s images speaks to a hermitic dimension of his own life: an uncertainty of close relationships rendered visually through empty, forgotten and unloved spaces between the spaces. This void is not an oversight but a poetic strategy, implying solitude, introspection and mirroring the partial, fragmentary nature of childhood half memories—those fleeting impressions from before the age of full recollective capacity.Despite their apparent mundanity, Farquhar’s chosen subjects—corrugated facades of disused distilleries, the mottled walls of post-war council estates, the skeletal structures of abandoned shipyards—are imbued with a quiet grandeur. In works such as Window Patterns and Light, Glasgow, the play of shadow on glass evokes both temporal erosion and latent possibility.Extending beyond industrial relics, Farquhar documents the nationwide ‘death of the high street,’ capturing shuttered shopfronts and vacant thoroughfares from Aberdeen to the Borders. His images chronicle the end of long-standing models of commerce and domestic life: facades once animated by daily trade now stand as ghostly spaces bereft of purposeful use. Through flat, face‑on compositions of empty promenades and silent arcades, he evokes both collective nostalgia and socio-economic critique, framing these derelict arteries as modern ruins of communal life.These unremarkable sites become, in Farquhar’s vision, his personal Wonders of the World: loci of overlooked beauty and repositories of collective memory.Farquhar’s autodidactic photography serves as a psychogeographical and mnemonic chronicle of Scotland. His flat, face-on compositions; his avoidance of exploitative tropes; the deliberate exclusion of human figures; and his focus on the wide, the close and the abstract coalesce into a singular visual lexicon. By finding beauty in the ordinary, Farquhar invites viewers to reconsider their own perceptions of space, memory and solitude.