Glaswegian life, captured over 80 years of redevelopment and flux

In 1977, Alasdair Gray – then four years off publishing his debut novel, the seminal Lanark: A Life in Four Books – was named Glasgow’s first artist-recorder. The role, conceived by Elspeth King, keeper of social history at the People’s Palace at the time, was funded by a new government employment scheme and involved the artist making portraits of modern Glaswegians (famous, typical, and otherwise) on a full time, 9‑to‑5 basis. 

“Elspeth King recognised that big city museums had paintings of the great and the good, from certain eras and times,” explains Katie Bruce, a curator and producer at GoMA, Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art. ​“Painting commissions were usually expensive, so that idea of spending time and painting everyday folk in the city – having a portrait of people in Glasgow, not just the high heid yins [or figures in authority] – it was contemporary.”

The concept of recording people, and the social and cultural observations made from them, is a central tenet of Still Glasgow, a group show at GoMA curated by Bruce that focuses on the communities that have called the city their home, and the various urban regeneration projects that have reshaped its concrete (and hence, societal) framework over the past 80 years. Predominantly showcasing photography, Gray’s Frances Gordon, Glasgow Teenager (1977) piece is a relative anomaly. Made predominantly from acrylics with collage, it taps into the way people have recorded their own experiences: an admin assistant at the People’s Palace, Gordon’s portrait is framed by ephemera like ticket stubs from trips and gigs, personal photographs and newspaper cuttings, each annotated by hand. 

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“Alisdair talked about watching a disappearing city and documenting it for other times, other people,” continues Bruce. ​“Moments are ephemeral, and we all know the rate of change that happens when regeneration and money take hold. It can be very quick, and you lose a sense of what communities were there; how people use certain spaces at certain times can suddenly be erased and forgotten. That is what a lot of the camera clubs, and professional photographers, were doing.” Indeed, in 1976 four photographers from the Partick Camera Club – a local photography group established in the early 1950s – had been commissioned by King to make a survey of The Calton in inner-east Glasgow, an area dense with tenement housing whose occupants were moved out of the centre on account of redevelopment. 

Earlier still, in 1945 the Queen’s Park Camera Club arrived almost in tandem with the release of the Bruce Report (the First Planning Report of the Glasgow Corporation). A controversial proposal for improving living conditions across Glasgow after the Second World War, it focused on rebuilding and re-housing, and though not implemented in full, would inform elements of the city’s regeneration through to the 1970s. ​“There is cyclical regeneration, but at all times people live there. And when you’re living in it, it happens incrementally,” Bruce adds, highlighting a further cognitive response to construction becoming commonplace. ​“Buildings go up, and you’re just aware of it.” 

Photography then became a way to engage with these changes, and Still Glasgow – initially devised after conversations with Street Level Photoworks director Malcolm Dickson, about the wider Glasgow Life Museums’ collection – can be read as a celebration of the city and the way it has come to be seen and defined by the medium. Highlighting the breadth of the city’s storytellers, with both straightforward documentary and more conceptual works on display, the show furthermore leans into Glasgow’s distinctive creative heritage (GoMA itself, notably, turns 30 in 2026).

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Photos by David Eustace from his series The Buskers Portfolio (1993).

Largely immortalised in black and white – see Bert Hardy’s iconic 1948 image, The Gorbals Boys, Joseph McKenzie’s Beatle Girl (1964−65), and The Great Eastern Hotel series Jane Evelyn Atwood made in the 1990s, as well as David Eustace’s The Buskers Portfolio (1993) and What’s It To You? (1975) by duo Stansfield/​Hooykaas – the works at GoMA identify technical and aesthetic trends as well as highlighting the different lifestyles and subsequent daily rhythms of areas around the city. 

Later colour photographs build on this legacy: Iseult Timmermans’s 10 Red Road Court for example, saw the photographer run a community studio for the last residents, primarily refugees and asylum seekers, at the Red Road Flats between 2010-12. Ahead of the building’s demolition, she made over 300 portraits and interior photographs, documenting the 30 floors. The Glendale Women’s Café meanwhile, worked with photographer Robin Mitchell in 2023, seeking to echo pictures taken by Eric Watt (a key member of the Queen’s Park Camera Club) of Glasgow life in the 1960s and ​’70s, making contemporary work in and about Pollokshields, where their space is based.

“It’s not a definitive portrait, or complete history of Glasgow, but there are recognisable elements,” says Bruce, noting that 40% of the museum’s visitors are local residents. ​“There’s also an empathy for how other people live; memory points, and a contemporary Glasgow that people might recognise.” Children, as if to underscore both the changes and similarities between decades, make frequent appearances in the show, and perhaps the most entertaining is Roderick Buchanan’s Gobstopper. A video piece from 1999, in it a group of kids, filmed individually in the backseat of a campervan, recall an old Glaswegian game, attempting to hold their breath as the vehicle travels through the Clyde Tunnel. They inevitably cheat, blowing their cheeks out or pretending to hold their nose, just as the children who feature in Watt’s Maxwell Park (1974) or Returning from the Game (1960s/​70s) might have done. 

“Lots of things aren’t known about the people in some of these photographs – they didn’t go around with consent forms, especially in the early ones. So you realise it’s really easy for the stories and the knowledge, even around images, to suddenly disappear,” offers Bruce, considering the role of photography and shows like this one. ​“We still don’t know who the girl is in Eric Watt’s Girl At Chalk-marked Wall (1960s) for example. But they’re fab photographs, and you’re always [as the viewer] drawn visually first, to the work. Then things start unravel within it.” 

Still Glasgow is on view through 13th June 2027 at Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow.

Zoe Whitfield is a freelance arts and photography writer. Follow her on Instagram.

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