The photographs appear unsettling at first sight. Some people often ask if they are charcoal drawings; a woman in California once burst into tears as she viewed one of Catriona Fraser's depictions of an ancient stone circle known as "The Magic Place." The woman was apparently psychic, as to the astonishment of Ms. Fraser's agent, she proceeded to describe the people who built the monument, one of the ancient world's greatest mysteries, the Picts.

Outspoken British photographer Catriona Trafford Fraser, an ardent critic of the government-supported Scottish art establishment makes her gallery debut in Richmond with a month-long exhibition which opens April 21 at the Hiedemann Gallery and runs until May 19th.

Ms. Fraser, who has exhibited widely not only in her native Britain, but also in Brazil, Mexico and the United States, (including Virginia, where she won last year's First Prize Award at the Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival) has been an often quoted critic of the state of the government funded arts in Scotland, where generous government grants to public galleries and artists have recently come under fire similar to the National Endowment for the Arts' problems in Washington.

Her work, which uses the rather difficult technique of black and white infrared photography, concentrates on capturing on film some of the lesser known Pictish stone circles and standing stones which abundantly dot the Scottish countryside as well as some of the more impressive medieval Scottish castles, ruins and keeps. "Infrared film works by capturing the infrared wavelength or heat signature of subjects on film," she explains.

"The Picts were the original inhabitants of northern Britain, which was called Caledonia by the Romans," she continues, "and left behind a fascinating series of stone monuments with a legend and lore to dwarf England's famed Stonehenge. There are hundreds, if not thousands of these sites in Scotland, and practically nothing is known of this matrilineal society and people, who were strong enough to resist the Romans and yet disappeared as a race by the 10th century."

Very little is known of the Picts; however, the invading Scots, who had settled on a small kingdom in southwestern Scotland which they called Dalriada, took control of the land in the year 845 A.D., when Kenneth MacAlpin, a Scot, became King of the Picts and Scots.

Although no one knows what they called themselves, they are known in history as Picts from the Latin word Pictii or "painted" which was the derisive name given to them by the Roman soldiers who guarded Hadrian's Wall, built specifically to keep the Pictish hordes north of Roman Britain. These soldiers noted the Pictish custom of painting or tattooing their entire bodies, although no visual recording of their appearance remains.

Their present day legacy in the stone monuments they left behind is the special and often mystical subject of Catriona Fraser's work. With a photographic career which started as an Assistant Photographer trainee at age 15 for the Reading Evening Post in England, Ms. Fraser became the youngest student ever accepted to the photography diploma course in Great Britain's prestigious Plymouth College of Art and Design. Ms. Fraser then started her own fine arts photography business in Scotland in 1991 and immediately won the Best of Show in the first professional art competition she entered (the 1992 Edzell Scottish Fine Arts Invitational). She followed that by organizing a traveling exhibition of her work and two other local Scottish artists working in traditional watercolors and ink drawings and depicting the same landscapes in the three media. Additionally, she had her first one person show in Banff, Scotland, held by a local private gallery.

Disappointed by the lack of general interest in photography she encountered in Scotland after that, she began exhibiting her work in the United States later that same year. A spectacular string of prizes and awards followed, including the Best of Show at the 17th International Photography Competition in Arkansas and First Prize at the Sixth Annual Roseville Photography Show in California as well as Second Prize in the 37th Annual Northern California Arts exhibition.

"At the same time that galleries in Scotland were telling me that photography was not art," she explains, "and I was begging the local council governments to get permission to have my work shown in small village libraries," she continues, "I had work being exhibited in places such as the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh and the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City! - How does one explain that attitude?"

She adds, "The enthusiasm and support which my work has received from the American public and critics more than makes up for the ignorance and apathy which I encountered in the galleries of Scotland." "It is a place where one person's personal likes and dislikes, governed by an elitist attitude towards only exhibiting what they consider 'contemporary art,' dictates what gets exhibited."

"As a result, the Scottish public is force-fed what these people call 'art' and most of us would recognize as rubbish."

"Of course," she adds smiling, "you have very similar problems here, as anyone who has been to a museum-sponsored exhibition of basketballs inside fish tanks knows."

"The problem," she speculates, "is that neither here nor in Britain the public is invited to decide what public funds or contributions will sponsor. It is really a shame to see our museums crammed with the work of minor Abstract painters who lay claim to great artistic fame and wealth at the expense of a public who is not invited to make the decisions on what artwork should be acquired with public funds or donations."

The Pictish series depict several striking stone circles as well as a magnificently carved single standing stone. "It was probably raised about the year 600 A.D.," she comments, "and historians think it commemorates the Battle of Nachsmere, where the combined Pictish hordes slew an invading Northumbrian army of over 5,000 men." In addition to her Pictish work, several pieces depict some impressive medieval castles and ruins, including her own ancestral clan castle, Castle Fraser in the Highlands. Particularly striking is Dunnottar Castle, sitting eerily on a rock 260 feet above the North Sea.