Snapshots of Empire Games Journeys: The Vernacular Photography of Peter Heatly and the 1950 Scotland Team

Sir Peter Heatly is a former Scottish diver who competed in three British Empire Games and one Olympic Games. On all his journeys to major competitions, he took personal photographs and kept published material and ephemera related to his trips, which were subsequently neatly stored in albums and scrapbooks, and, until 2018, were kept by his family when they deposited the personal archive to the University of Stirling. The vernacular photography of Heatly provides personal evidence of sport mega-events from the mid-twentieth century from an athlete’s perspective. It raises questions about the value of vernacular photography, family albums, and scrapbooks for interpreting and understanding the cultural historiography of sport and how much visual culture helps make sense of the cultures of international sport during the post-war period. The article provides some critical and analytical approaches to the use of such material, questioning the motivations for their original production and archiving, as well as recognizing such photographs are not simple documents of the past with unproblematic meanings but are contingent on specific “networks of authority” and open to contested meanings.