Présentation de l'artiste

Robby Ogilvie

Robby Ogilvie (b. 1986, Edinburgh) is a Scottish photographic artist exploring perception, place and our relationship with the environments we inhabit. Working across digital, analogue and mobile photography, his practice moves between conceptual and post documentary approaches, with a particular interest in overlooked details, visual relationships and moments in which the familiar begins to shift towards the surreal. Ogilvie is the winner of the 2026 Sony World Photography Awards, Open Competition, Object category, and a recipient of the i-D × Ray-Ban RED Global Award. His work has received extensive international recognition, including selection and distinction across the International Photography Awards, National Geographic Traveller Photography Competition, Benjamin Hall Photography Award, Minimalist Photography Awards and URBAN Photo Awards. His work has been exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally, including at Somerset House, Saatchi Gallery, the Royal Scottish Academy and Art Basel Hong Kong, alongside invited and selected exhibitions across Europe, Asia and Africa. His photographs have also been extensively published both nationally and internationally across specialist photography and wider media, including The Guardian, Forbes and Colossal. His work Holding Up the Sky is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Avant-garde, Milan. He holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory with Distinction from Edinburgh College of Art.

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, place and our relationship with the environments we inhabit. Working between conceptual and post documentary photography, I use photography less as a means of description than as a way of questioning how we see, interpret and assign meaning to what surrounds us. Attention is central to this process. These concerns come together in my ongoing project Acts of Attention, which examines what becomes visible when sustained attention is given to environments we ordinarily move through without looking closely. The project begins from the belief that attention is not passive: to look carefully is to make a choice about what is allowed to matter. In a culture shaped by visual excess, acceleration and distraction, it considers slow looking as a form of quiet resistance. Made through everyday encounters with overlooked objects, surfaces, gestures and moments of light, the photographs ask how meaning is constructed through looking and challenge assumptions about what is considered worthy of attention. At the heart of the project is a wider question: what do the things we choose to notice reveal about the environments we inhabit, and in turn, about ourselves? Made using a mobile phone, the work also questions hierarchies around photographic subject, medium and value.