Thirty years have passed since John Hannavy's biography of Thomas Keith, Thomas Keith's Scotland, was published by Canongate, and the time is right to revisit Keith's work and that of his brother-in-law John Forbes White. The precise authorship of a significant number of images produced by the two men is uncertain - they often worked together, shared each other's cameras and, unhelpfully, did not always sign or initial their work.

This new project sets out to review the holdings of all the major collections of Keith and White's work in Britain, the USA and Canada, and carry out a detail re-examination of the surviving prints and negatives with a view to compiling an electronic catalogue raisonée.

Three decades after the publication of Thomas Keith's Scotland, John Hannavy is writing a new monograph on the work of both Keith and White - which was restricted by professional pressures to just a few years in the 1850s. Despite the brevity of their engagement with photography, the legacy of the two men is considerable, and their importance within the history of Scottish photography is beyond dispute.

Since the book was first published, a great deal of significant work has been undertaken by numerous researchers on 19th century Scottish photography, making it possible now to place the work of these talented amateurs within the much more clearly understood context of early photography in Scotland.

John Hannavy delivered the keynote address at the Thomas Keith Symposium held in Edinburgh in November 2006.

The Victorian World of Dr Thomas Keith and John Forbes White is the working title for the new book which, subject to the acquisition of sufficient funding, will offer a fundamental reappraisal of the two men's contributions to early Scottish photography. Possible spreads from the new edition will shortly be illustrated below.