Werner Friedrich Theodor Kissling was an amateur ethnographer and amateur photographer.
He left a rich legacy of photographs and film of the traditional customs and crafts of various world communities, a legacy, which today, now forms a remarkable, valuable record of ‘ways of life’, which have now vanished. The communities that he studied include, the crofters of Eriskay and South Uist, Scotland, the farmers and fisherfolk of Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, the Māori of New Zealand, and the craftsmen of North Yorkshire, England.
Kissling was an intriguing figure who, though born into an aristocratic, land-owning family, managed to ‘dispose’ of his multimillion-pound inheritance and die penniless in a Dumfries old folk's home. In his twenties, as a young German diplomat, he was rich, had social status and apparently had an assured career in front of him. Yet he chose to turn his back on all the privileges that life had afforded him, and pursue his amateur interests in ethnography and photography.