Still Glasgow: Notes on an exhibition

It is over 40 years since Lanark was published (and over 70 years since it was begun in the early 1950’s) and this city – loved and resided in by the author – was placed at the centre of his mid-career magnum opus. Alasdair Gray spent a lifetime writing, observing, drawing and photographing Glasgow into a place of his imagination, but also documenting the built heritage around him that was disappearing through regeneration and being carved up in the post war years to serve the car, modern industry and a revised model of social housing. A staunch socialist, his ambition for the city was to amplify the voice of the artist, write about the everyday and create a more just and equitable society in an independent Scotland free from nuclear weapons. This he did both in the realm of his imagination and in documentation of the lives around him – proud of his working-class heritage.

I am always in admiration of the singularity of artists and photographers for capturing the details, observing the long game and finding poetic ways to record what is there often right in front of us and hardly ever noticed. Growing up in Glasgow as a teenager in the 1980’s I have a certain recollection of the changing cityscape and movement of people and communities, having moved here in 1984 the year after the Glasgow’s Miles Better campaign was launched.

I know I had fun seeking out teenage revelries. As with Gray’s portrait of Frances Gordon, Glasgow Teenager, 1977, emptying the contents of my bag would have revealed the gig stubs for Hue and Cry, Del Amitri and The River Detectives, alongside train tickets to see friends across the city and photobooth declarations of lifelong friendships. But it was also a place I left when I was 17 – an anomaly in my school as most didn’t ever consider leaving the familiar place where they had grown up. Yet despite this early departure, I returned 13 years later, with the support and advice of the brilliant Alison Stirling^[1], to navigate a city and its cultural scene from within GoMA, a cultural institution that was charting its own distinctive path having opened six years before. In that time the city had changed yet again from my memory of it and continues to shift with my recollections becoming hazy and reliant on photographs – both family and those held by the city.

Still Glasgow emerges from some of those renowned images of a city defined by certain works such as The Gorbals Boys and The Castlemilk Boys or more commonly known as The Castlemilk Lads to daily life captured through the Calton Survey 1977 (taken by four members of the Partick Camera Club) and the archive of Eric Watt (a member of the Queen’s Park Camera Club) alongside more recent acquisitions – both documentary photography and part of conceptual artworks. It has works by people born and bred here, alongside those that moved into the city and those that visited – interested by what Glasgow could offer, even briefly. Still Glasgow is not a definitive portrait of the city, there are too many gaps in the collection and very limited space within the museum to realise that, but it does explore how photographers and artists have documented a city in order to: highlight living conditions and argue for social change; document a city full of hope that a postwar regeneration programme might bring; document a city that shows the joy, friendships and resilience of the young, and document those spaces across the city where we work, live and gather.

It is an immense privilege being a curator at Glasgow Life Museums. We are able to work on exhibitions for our venues drawing from an incredible public collection amassed over 170 years and cared for by wonderful colleagues in collections management, conservation and logistics. Works not on display in one of Glasgow Life Museums’ seven museum venues are stored at Glasgow Museums Resource Centre (GMRC) on Glasgow’s south side.  Part of my role is to support access to modern and contemporary art when requests to see particular works come in from members of the public.

In 2023, the Director of Street Level Photoworks^[2], Malcolm Dickson, requested to see some photographs of Glasgow by Jane Evelyn Atwood, Nick Danziger, Alan Dimmick, David Eustace, Oscar Marzaroli and Joseph McKenzie as part of his research towards a programme of exhibitions marking Glasgow’s 850^th year since being granted burgh status. While these works would not go on to feature in the excellent exhibitions earlier this year at SLP^[3], having a chance to see these works usually held in archival boxes in the store sparked the thought of a collection show with Glasgow and photography at its core. Fast forward to late last year, the opportunity arose to curate a show from the collection and the idea for Still Glasgow was born.

Photography is always popular in the museum, and it has been a while since a photographic show was held at GoMA. For a long time, I was only considering photography but then Roderick Buchanan’s video work – Gobstopper, 1999 – was impossible to ignore and worked delightfully in the final room of the show. The discovery of John T Thomson’s Glasgow Past and Present behind other stacked prints in a store (and realising that it was created for Glasgow 800 in 1975) quickly entered the mix for the works in the first room and disrupted initial plans of a purely photographic venture.

Gallery 3 is split into 3 rooms. The first room of Still Glasgow is titled Community and Place. The works in this room look at some of the changes in the built heritage of Glasgow over the last 80 years. The introduction of social housing and regeneration projects across the city have altered some areas beyond recognition. Photographers featured in this room have documented local communities, and in some cases their lived experience has informed what they feel is important to their area. There are also differences in approach. Some like the photographs by Bert Hardy (1948), Jane Evelyn Atwood (1994) and Nick Danziger (1994) have been used in photo essays arguing for social change, particularly in inner city housing. Others have documented periods of regeneration and hope like Eric Watt, Joseph McKenzie and Oscar Marzaroli in 1960’s Gorbals. More recent photography by Glendale Women’s café responding to the Eric Watt photographic collection and works by Iseult Timmermans who documented the occupants of 10 Red Road Court, show the diverse communities who have made Glasgow their home.

Room 2 is Picturing the Community. Here portraits of Glasgow citizens and visitors are captured through studio portraits or commissions and street photography, before the advent of mobile phones and digital cameras. Some of these photographs, such as Hardy’s Two Boys in the Street, known locally as The Gorbals Boys, and Marzaroli’s The Castlemilk Boys, have become well known and symbolic of childhood in Glasgow. One of the threads that runs through the works is Joan Eardley and her paintings of children. She is photographed in her studio by Oscar Marzaroli, alongside his portrait of the Samson family – whom she often painted. Joseph McKenzie was inspired by Eardley’s paintings of childhood in Glasgow for his Gorbals Children series, and Eric Watts Girl at chalk-marked wall, follows in this vein.

Linda McCartney’s Paul, Glasgow, 1970 is an iconic portrait of the former Beatle member in the streets of Glasgow, the band having split up that year. David Eustace’s first and formative portrait series after graduating is The Buskers and is shown in the same room. Interested in emulating the work of Martin Chambi and August Sander, Eustace invited buskers he saw on the streets of Glasgow to his studio on Clyde Street to take their portraits. He would go on to photograph Paul McCartney numerous times, along with numerous other celebrities and alongside high-profile commissions, in the UK and USA he would have his photographs included regularly in GQ, Vogue and Tatler magazines.

Mathew Arthur Williams portrait of Charlie Prodger is a superb photograph of the Turner Prize 2019 winning artist as it forms part of an ongoing commission with them to document artists in the collection. It sits at the entrance to the final room which responds to Stansfield/Hooykaas’ groundbreaking installation work What’s It To you? From 1975 which rooted in Glasgow – its places, people and vernacular – was originally shown at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre.

What’s it to you? (Room 3) is primarily occupied by works by people who would consider themselves artists rather than photographers, however photography enters their practice. Alasdair Gray worked from photographs but also included them in his portraits for the City Recorder series from 1977. In the most recent acquisition on display in Still Glasgow, Easels – a conceptual artwork by Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan includes fifteen framed black and white photographs of artists in their studios in Glasgow, taken by the artists and each framed in an idiosyncratic hand-made wooden frame.

Easels was first made for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2016 and shown as part of a solo exhibition by the artists at The Modern Institute. On one level Easels functions as a seemingly anthropological gaze on Glasgow’s visual art community at a moment in time, but the formal and aesthetic decisions employed by the artists disrupt interpreting the work as a piece of documentary photography. One of those artist portraits is Roderick Buchanan, whose work Gobstopper is also on display in this room. The photographs taken by Tom and Joanne were printed by Alan Dimmick, whose photograph Franz Ferdinand, The Captain’s Rest, Glasgow is included here: a nod to the intertwining of Glasgow’s art and music scenes and the city’s status as UNESCO City of Music, but also the links between photographer, artist and sitter reveal other areas of connectedness and how a collection can hold these relationships.

A note on the title

Still Glasgow title: an exhibition of works from Glasgow Life Museums’ collection with photography at its core.

Still noun: a static photograph
Still adjective:  devoid of or abstaining from motion
Still adjective: uttering no sound : quiet
Still adjective: free from noise or turbulence
Still verb: to arrest the motion of
Still adverb: in a progressive manner : increasingly
Still adverb: in spite of that
Still adverb: yet sense – has still to be recognised

The definitions of still set up a series of contradictions when paired with Glasgow – to me Glasgow is a city that has energy, creativity, and a history of invention and change. It is a city that constantly reinvents itself, through necessity or sheer tenacity. It is never devoid of or abstaining from motion, free from noise or turbulence and its people are known to engage even the hardiest in conversation at bus stops and in passing. Glasgow punches above it weight and is increasingly ambitious and in spite of massive social and political challenges continues to come together in communities to fight injustice: in particular I’m thinking of the Kenmure Street protests with documentation of the event recently coming in to the collection.

Still Glasgow is also a show that circles around anniversaries

A city that is 850 years old.
Works that sees their 50^th anniversary.
GoMA turns 30 in 2026.

These marker points in history that allow for a sense of nostalgia – photographs as documentation, but also maskers of truth. In this finite selection there are numerous gaps in voice, place and realities that resonate with Glasgow citizens now. While there are definitely moments to celebrate and reflect on, Still Glasgow reminds us to look again, to see the past rub up against the present, to think about what matters and what we can learn from past hopes, protests and recorded histories but we need more than nostalgia for a city less defined by cars, city centre shopping destinations and demolition grounds for children to play on.

Glasgow presents itself as thriving, ‘gallus Glesga’, questioning the legacies of old money, a socialist and radical ground for people to come together socially and creatively. But the reality is a lot more precarious than this – how in these moments of clear political and cultural divisiveness do we come together as fellow humans and think about how in these moments – echoing words of Larry Herman – do we find solidarity and shared compassion to create a more equitable society and social change? Or, to finish as I started this post with the words of Alasdair Gray (paraphrased from the Canadian poet Dennis Lee) and inscribed on the Cannongate Wall in Holyrood in 2004 – ‘Live as if in the early days of a better nation’?

The wonderful title that captures the essence of the show, but also opens some of the nuances threading these works together, is down to Nadia Lucchesi – our wonderful marketing officer. The show had unimaginatively been titled – ‘Gallery 3 collection exhibition’, then A City Revisited before her insightful suggestion.

In thinking about Still Glasgow I was keen to include works by artists which had Glasgow and photography (and by that extension film) at their core. The chance remark by my colleague Martin McSheaffrey Craig about Alasdair Gray works from the City Recorder series, originally acquired for the collection through Alasdair’s residency at The People’s Palace in 1977. Working at GoMA with Glasgow Life Museums’ collection enables us as curators to look beyond the Fine Art holdings and draw together works from across social history and Open Museum collecting activity. I am indebted the foresight of curators (past and present) for their astute acquisitions of renowned works by photographer and artists: Deborah Hasse (Jane Evelyn Atwood), Dr Elspeth King (Calton Survey 1977, Bert Hardy and City Recorder 1977), Isobel Macdonald (Glendale Women’s Café and Larry Herman), Fiona Hayes (Oscar Marzaroli), Elaine Addington and the Open Museum (Iseult Timmermans and Walking in My Shoes), Ben Harman (Alan Dimmick) and Alison Brown who was the initial contact for Eric Watt’s family gifting us his fantastic archive. The former Director of Glasgow Museums – Julian Spalding – was also key in the acquisition of the Buskers series by David Eustace as the photographer remembers being approached by him to purchase this series, noting that it is one of two unique and complete editions that Eustace hand printed.

As ever this kind of show is never a solo project, I have had many conversations with the wonderful artists and photographers involved at different stages in this exhibition. The generosity of all the women at Glendale Women’s café, Malcolm Dickson, Iseult Timmermans, Madelon Hooykass, David Eustace, Jane Evelyn Atwood, Alan Dimmick, Roderick Buchanan, Matthew Arthur Williams, Keith Ingham, Ellie Royle, Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan have been crucial to helping me gain confidence about the direction of the show and the works to include. My colleagues in GoMA, curatorial teams, conservation (past and present), collections management, logistics, editing, design, photography, programme, marketing, retail, front of house, learning and admin have all contributed above and beyond towards this exhibition to make it a reality.

^[1] Alison Stirling, Artistic Director, Artlink – an organisation based in Edinburgh that I worked for 2000 -2002

^[2] Photography gallery and an open access photographic production facility founded by the Glasgow Photography Group in 1989

^[3] Depth of Field (12 April 2025 – 29 June 2025) and The Scene from Within (19 July 2025 – 19 October 2025)