Still Glasgow

Including works by Bert Hardy and Oscar Marzaroli to Alan Dimmick and Iseult Timmermans, this exhibition spotlights the Scottish city and its photography from the 1940s to the present, but above all it is a record of the people who have called Glasgow home

Iseult Timmermans, 10 Red Road Court, 2012. © Iseult Timmermans.

Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
29 November 2025 – 13 June 2026

by BETH WILLIAMSON

There are a number of ways you could understand the title of this exhibition. Still Glasgow, we are told, “celebrates its [Glasgow’s] multiple entwined histories – of culture, class, protest, humour and ambition – but looks beyond nostalgia and asks how the city can imagine its future”. Through the display of about 80 works from the 1940s to the present day, selected from Glasgow Life Museums’ collection, the exhibition looks at the city and its photography. Perhaps, then, the title refers to still photographic images of Glasgow, but then it includes moving images too. Or maybe it gestures to the idea that the heart of Glasgow and its people is still the same, despite huge changes across the period concerned. The population of Glasgow has shifted massively since the 1940s, but as the popular slogan goes “People Make Glasgow” whoever they are. In 2013, Glasgow city council ran a £500,000 campaign to promote the slogan as a brand or identity for the city, and it has stuck. Now, it can often be seen graffitied on railway sidings or bridges and people still talk about it. This exhibition, then, shows us some of the people who make Glasgow past and present.

Eric Watt, Returning from the Game, about 1960s/70s.

There is a marked shift in how the city and its people are represented in this exhibition. Broadly speaking, the earlier images in the exhibition were taken by male documentary photographers, working alone and representing their subjects as they saw them. This group includes well-known names such as Bert Hardy and Oscar Marzaroli, both of whom had notable careers in photojournalism elsewhere but are still remembered for their photographs of Glasgow and its people. I recall my father, a passionate amateur photographer himself, introducing me to Marzaroli’s photography and giving me a copy of Shades of Grey: Glasgow 1956-1987 (images by Marzaroli and words by William McIlvanney) to take with me when I moved from Glasgow to London – I still have it. Images such as The Castlemilk Lads (1963) are instantly recognisable as Marzaroli’s and bring a sense of familiarity to the exhibition. The unnamed boys in the photograph seem to jostle for position in front of the camera. They stand on a grassy slope with high-rise flats behind them. They are in Castlemilk, one of the biggest housing estates in Europe at the time, and grasp at their momentary fame. What is incredible about this image is that, as the archives show, Marzaroli captured it in a single take. It is difficult to know what attracted him to the environments and people he photographed. He photographed extensively in Glasgow’s Gorbals area, for instance, including his famous Golden Haired Lass (1964) and it has been said that he wanted to capture areas like this that were fast disappearing. Yet he captured other artists and their subjects too. Two photographs that do that in this exhibition are Joan Eardley in her Townhead Studio and The Samson Children in Joan Eardley’s Studio, Townhead, both taken in 1962.

Joseph McKenzie, Untitled (photograph depicting girls petting dog). © Joseph McKenzie.

Children and poverty are common subjects in this exhibition and it is not just the domain of Marzaroli. Hardy’s The Gorbals Boys and Untitled – Two Girls Sitting by Kitchen Sink, both from 1948, give a slightly early view of such subjects. Joseph McKenzie’s Gorbals Children and Girls Petting Dog (both 1964-65) provide yet another view contemporary with that of Marzaroli. Eric Watt’s Girl at Chalk-Marked Wall (c1960s) is an unusual example in colour from this period.

Eric Watt, Girl At Chalk-marked Wall, about 1960s.

The chronologically later images in the exhibition are often, though not exclusively, collective and taken by women working together in their communities in Glasgow. By the mid-1970s we see the beginings of these sorts of projects with What’s It to You? (1975), a collaboration between Elsa Stansfield and Madelon Hooykaas in the early years of video art. Combining photography and text with recorded and live video, interviews with members of the public changed the work daily. While the original work is lost, the remaining photographs show the Barras and Sauchiehall Street areas along with brief but quite profound questions asked about the show: Have you grown as much as the city? Has the city changed as much as you? What are you looking for? What are you offering?

Joseph McKenzie, Gorbals Children 1964-65 (1964-65). © Joseph McKenzie.

The 2016 work Easels, made by Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan, offers reflections on the representation of artists as a group identity or art scene. Photographed in various studios across the city between 2015 and 2016, it represents a very particular aspect of Glasgow and, to my mind, feels somewhat out of place in an exhibition that otherwise captures the spirit of the place. Much more fitting, perhaps, are the variety of photographers and photographs that capture the commonplace activities across the years: Marzaroli’s Scottish Cup Final, Hampden Park (1965), Watt’s May Day (1977) and Alan Dimmick’s Franz Ferdinand, The Captain’s Rest, Glasgow (2007) all come to mind.

Social housing and regeneration projects have been vital across Glasgow in the last 80 years. Areas such as the Gorbals and Easterhouse photographed by Marzaroli and Hardy have been transformed. Documenting local communities now is different and, in some instances, lived experience informs how they are represented and what they represent. For instance, Walking in My Shoes was a photography project by young Roma people living in the Govanhill area of Glasgow. Showing their neighbourhood through their eyes, we see images such as Untitled – Family in Window (2012) by Anetta Tancosova and Untitled – Barbed Wire and Church (2012) by Nikola Krugova.

Iseult Timmermans, 10 Red Road Court, 2012. © Iseult Timmermans.

Some of the strongest images in this exhibition are from Iseult Timmermans’ project 10 Red Road Court (2012). The Red Road Flats are famous in Glasgow, even though they no longer exist. They were built in the 1960s as part of an ambitious social housing policy. From 2003, they became home to many asylum seekers and refugees coming to Glasgow. Then, between 2010 and 2015, they were demolished. Timmermans worked through a community studio and creative programme to enable remaining residents to document the flats in more than 300 images and so capture something of the place and the people who had lived there. It is a powerful project in terms of ambition and impact.

Khansa Aslam, Family on the Roundabout. © Khansa Aslam.

Rashida Hanif, Shazia Rani, Khansa Aslam, Zubaidah Azad and others all capture the diversity and vigour of contemporary Glasgow, a lively and open city where people can be themselves. This community project, in 2023, ran through the Glendale Women’s Cafe in the Pollokshields area of Glasgow, a safe space where people can come together, and the participants were inspired by Watt’s earlier photographs to make others that reflected their own experience of Glasgow. Working with photographer Robin Mitchell they captured contemporary scenes, 12 of which are included in this exhibition. This project is emblematic of that shift I mentioned at the start where, as this exhibition seems to say, increasingly it is the people of Glasgow, not photographers, who find ways to represent themselves. People still make Glasgow.

Zubaidah Azad, Friends Getting Together. © Zubaidah Azad.