There are people who resist easy description, and Misha Somerville is one of them. A Scottish photographer, documentary filmmaker, musician and craftsman, he has spent the past two decades pursuing each of those things with equal seriousness — and the results speak for themselves.
Somerville’s background is in music. He played with the band ‘Croft No. Five’ before founding MK Whistles in 2000, building the operation from a workshop in Glasgow into one of the most respected independent instrument makers in the world. Handcrafted from aluminium, the whistles are known for their innovative design, precision tuning and exceptional tone. They have developed a devoted following among players across the Celtic music world and beyond, and remain genuinely difficult to get hold of — testament to the care with which each one is made.
Alongside the whistle making, Somerville has built a body of photographic and documentary work that takes him to places where something significant is happening and where the world’s media is often not paying attention. He was in the Gambia in January 2017 when Yahya Jammeh — who had ruled the country for twenty-two years through torture, extrajudicial killings and the systematic repression of dissent — was finally forced from power following his defeat in the December 2016 election. When Jammeh left Banjul airport for exile in Equatorial Guinea, Somerville was there to photograph it. The image of a dictator’s departure, captured at a moment of genuine historical consequence, is the kind of photograph that only exists because someone was willing to be in the right place.
He was also in Kyiv in 2014, on the frontline of the Maidan protests as the situation descended into something far more dangerous than a demonstration. In the final days of February, government snipers opened fire on protesters gathered in Independence Square, killing more than a hundred people in what became one of the bloodiest episodes of the revolution. Somerville was among them, camera in hand, documenting events that would ultimately bring down President Yanukovych and set Ukraine on a collision course with Russia.
His documentary work operates in the same territory. Two of his photo documentaries are featured on the Dancing Turtle website: People of the Earth, Wind and Fire (2013), a short photo documentary made among the Dor Dinka people of South Sudan, and Stronger Than Yolanda (2014), made two months after Typhoon Haiyan had devastated the Philippines and the world’s media had moved on. Both films share a common instinct — to look carefully at what is there when no one else is looking.
He has also photographed life inside the Calais jungle camps, documenting the thousands of migrants and refugees living in makeshift conditions on the northern French coast as they waited for a chance to reach Britain — work that sits in the same tradition as David Fedele’s The Land Between, made just across the Mediterranean a year earlier.
A third film, made for the Aswan Heart Centre in Egypt, documents the remarkable work of world-leading heart surgeon Magdi Yacoub and his team, who set out to bring world-class cardiac care to one of the most deprived regions of upper Egypt. It is a film about medicine as a moral commitment.
For anyone curious about the wider body of work, Misha’s photography and documentary output can be found at mishaphoto.com and his Instagram. If you have any interest in folk, Celtic or acoustic music, MK Whistles is well worth your time — these are instruments made by someone who plays, built with the kind of attention to craft that is increasingly rare. Find them at mkwhistles.com. These are instruments that serious players seek out for their tone, their precision and their playability. Demand consistently outstrips supply — which tells you something.
