Werner studied the Scottish crofters of Eriskay and South Uist, the farmers and fisherfolk of Dumfries and Galloway, the Māori of New Zealand,[1] and the culture of North Yorkshire.

In his twenties, as a young German diplomat, he was rich, had social status and apparently had an assured career; he chose to pursue his interests in ethnography and photography.

The 'Marshes' remained in the family until 1927, when his older brother by two years, Georg Conrad, who was running the business by this time, was forced to sell it, due to financial difficulties.

The rise of the Nazi Party in the Weimar Republic continued to distress him and after Adolf Hitler's National Revolution in 1933, Kissling was forced to resign his position at the German embassy.

Indeed, he would spend 3 months living in such a house with its limited facilities, light years away from what he would have been accustomed to back in his ancestral home in Germany.

Four years later, in 1938, Kissling made an enthnographic field trip to New Zealand, financed by himself, where he photographed the traditional skills of the Māori peoples.

Kissling's anti-Nazi opinions were already well known to the British authorities and even though he was transferred to an internment camp on the Isle of Man, he was promoted to a welfare officer for fellow German internees.

[2] In 1968, Kissling settled in Dumfries, where he spent the last 20 years of his life, working as an anthropologist and photographer for the town's Burgh Museum, basing himself in a lean-to out-building.

The funds raised were used to build Eriskay’s first major road, running from the old pier at Haunn in the north to the harbour at Acairseid in the south.

Werner Kissling died penniless,[7] on 3 February 1988 at the Moorheads Nursing Home in Dumfries, leaving behind him one of the most extensive photographic records of the Scottish Hebrides ever made.

In his room, was found a single suitcase, filled with personal papers, photographs and lantern slides[8] reflecting his involvement with the people of the Western Isles.

Alfred Truckell, ex-curator of the Dumfries museum, describes Kissling as ”a brilliant man whose interests were wide-ranging and of international importance”.

He made a splendid film on the Māoris of New Zealand, and he spent three months in a black house getting an insight into crofting life.”[citation needed] He was a private man who wished no public recognition for himself or his work while he was alive.

"He considered his research to be a race against time, and he only gave up when forced by ill-health and crippling arthritis," Mr David Lockwood, the Dumfries museum curator, wrote in Kissling's obituary.

Michael Russell, chief executive of the Scottish National Party, produced the film which was entitled, "Kissling – Duin' Ioma Fhillte", and was first broadcast in November 2009.

The photographs and films that were curated by Jenny Brownrigg were by Helen Biggar, Violet Banks, Christina Broom, Mary Ethel Muir Donaldson, Dr Beatrice Garvie, Jenny Gilbertson, Isabel Frances Grant, Ruby Grierson, Marion Grierson, Isobel Wylie Hutchison, Johanna Kissling, Isabell Burton-MacKenzie, Margaret Fay Shaw and Margaret Watkins[9] Eriskay: A Poem of Remote Lives, 1934 (see video in External Links) Man, Vol.