Scottish born, Alexander Wilson Hill (1867-1949) entered into a career as a banker which lasted until his retirement in 1932. His interest in photography dates to the period in the late 1890s when he was appointed as bank manager in the Outer Hebrides. Hill's pictorial style and use of pigment processes may have been influenced by an earlier interest in oil painting in the 1880s. He later turned almost exclusively to bromoil and bromoil transfer processes and many of his finest pictures were taken in the 1930s after his retirement.
Before his death, Hill destroyed all that was not up to his standards or that marked a significant point in his experiments. His work is now in the collections of the Smithsonian in Washington, the Edinburgh Photographic Society and the Royal Photographic Society.