Published by the National Galleries of Scotland in 1987, *William Carrick: 1827–1878* is the third volume in the Scottish Masters series. Written by Felicity Ashbee and Julie Lawson, this 32-page illustrated softcover places a concise monographic frame around a photographer whose life connected Scotland with nineteenth-century Russia. Its scale is modest, but its focus is exact: biography, photographic practice, and historical setting are brought into close relation.

Carrick was born in Edinburgh in 1827 and moved with his family to Kronstadt, the Russian naval base, shortly after his birth. In 1859 he established a studio in St Petersburg with John MacGregor. That trajectory complicates any straightforward national classification. Carrick belongs to Scottish photographic history through origin, yet his working career was shaped in Russia; the book’s place in a series devoted to Scottish masters therefore also opens onto a wider, transnational account of early photography.

Among the subjects associated with Carrick are hawkers, artisans, and street traders. These photographs draw attention to occupational identity and everyday urban life rather than confining his work to the formal studio portrait. Seen within his biography, they suggest how the camera could move between commercial practice, social description, and the construction of recognizable human types in the nineteenth century.

For a collector, the book’s interest lies less in claims of lavishness than in its clarity of purpose. It is an institutionally published, compact study that situates Carrick within both Scottish and Russian histories of photography. The collaboration between Ashbee and Lawson, the Scottish Masters context, and the concentration on a comparatively circumscribed career make it useful as both a reference and a focused encounter with a photographer working across cultural boundaries.