I’ve been to Glasgow twice only and both visits were brief. The first time I was picking up a party of 60 Mormons which I was to lead on a 7-day whistlestop tour of Edinburgh, The Lake District, Chester, Stratford, London and Paris. I was petrified some of them would get themselves lost on the Tube in London so I gave them a long briefing – how the Tube works, how you pay and so on. At the end I asked for any questions and a voice piped up: “Say, Peter. What’s a Toob?”
On my second visit I was leading a group of one (Mrs Barker – my nascent professional career as a travel guide having crashed and burned when the above American group missed their plane home). We were on a significant birthday jaunt to The Outer Hebrides. At Glasgow airport, a lady whom I assumed to be cabin crew, led us across the apron to the twin-engined Cessna, examined our boarding cards and did the safety routine. Then she entered the cockpit, started the engines, taxied down the runway, flew us over and landed on the beach on the Isle of Harris. Very cool.
So when I saw that Glasgow’s very excellent Street Level Photoworks were putting on what looked like an interesting exhibition by a photographer unknown to me, Oscar Marzaroli, I thought it was a good chance to kill two birds with one stone: see the exhibition and explore the city. Alas, it was not to be. Mother Nature intervened, we were locked down and it seems that Glasgow and I are destined to remain strangers for a little while longer. I did however order a small book from Streetlevel “Oscar Marzaroli” to get a better idea of the work and which, at £15, came in well under my self-imposed limit of £20 for any book of photographs.
Obviously, for that price you are not going to get top quality reproduction but the book gives a good idea of the man and the work and I must declare myself drawn to both. This is just the kind of photography I like: somehow underplayed and unpretentious yet carrying a social and psychological impact that I started to feel only on second and third viewing. The book mostly lets the photos speak for themselves – which is always a relief. There is a scene-setting introduction with biographical details; an interview with Oscar from 1986; and the photos are interspersed with short observations from commentators over the years.
You can read Oscar’s biography on Streetlevel’s website here. In short, he was the son of Italian parents who immigrated here in the 1930s when he was two years old. Apparently, he moved back and forth between the countries during his childhood and never felt he belonged to either. He became a documentary photographer and film-maker who spent much of his career capturing the changing Glasgow streetscene from the 1950s to 1980s. This was a period of vertiginous decline for Glasgow – as indeed it was for many other British industrial cities: its population just about halved in the decades after the second world war. Tenement blocks were demolished, communities were displaced, road systems invaded the city and industry disappeared.* It’s all there in the photographs which capture so much of this change.
But look – what’s this?
Women at work in the Communal Wash House (The Steamie), Townhead, 1968.
Lone Boy, Gorbals, 1963.
Yes, of course we know when these photographs were taken and where. Both figures are physically in one place but psychologically look somewhere completely different. So don’t these two photos actually transcend time and place? Couldn’t they just as easily be characters from Dostoevsky, from Gorky, from Zola, from Flaubert - human types lifted from 19th century Nevsky Prospekt or the Marais and plumped down in late 20th century Scotland?
And what about this, below?
Expectation, Celtic End, Cup Final, Hampden Park 1963.
What better riposte could there be to the remark that there is no such thing as society? If that were so, this wouldn’t be a football crowd either - just people standing on terraces. (Unfortunately for Oscar, who was a great Glasgow Celtic fan, the victors that year were Rangers who won the replay 3-0 after a 1-1 draw first time round - before a crowd of 129,643. One hundred and twenty-nine thousand six hundred and forty-three souls. This section is only a tiny fraction of the whole…..)
There are many images of demolition and rebuilding (the construction of the Red Road flats, for instance, which were themselves demolished in 2015); of industrial skylines; of impoverished children at play; of dimly lit boozers; of the city’s artists and writers; of shipyards and markets, backstreets and courtyards. These are photographs of record but in that sense, though accomplished, they are probably no different from many others documenting the decline of the British industrial city. They aren’t your high-contrast, grainy, poke-you-in-the-eye photographic tours de force. It’s more the accumulated impact. They seem to be the backdrop to some vast and sprawling epic which has no beginning and no end. As though, even while the form is changing before our very eyes, the substance remains the same.
On the one hand you might look through these photographs, shake your head and say: “Aye, well……it’s all gone now.” Well, it has and it hasn’t. Maybe there are many more distractions these days – especially the hypercolour of the modern digital photograph. But I imagine that if we were able to spirit Oscar back to today’s Glasgow, to hand him a camera and ask him to get cracking then he would come up with something not dissimilar. The rituals of the street have changed sure enough: the rag and bone man, the milk deliveries, the funeral onlookers and the shiftworkers. But in the end it’s all in the looking.
What catches your eye in this photo below? The angle of their bodies? The sleet? Or the posters for a then-unknown Winifred Ewing in a then-marginal SNP? Context, people, history.
Sleet, Gorbals, April 1968.
I wonder if Oscar’s background might account for some of this quality in his work. His home life growing up must have been partly Italian and partly Scottish. And presumably he was bilingual. (They do say that to speak a second language is to have a second soul.) Such a life must make you observant of difference and perhaps also tolerant of it. It may not be so glamorous, but to turn your gaze again and again onto the same subjects will in the end, I believe, reveal rather more than a constant search for the new and spectacular. I understand that the plan is to extend the exhibition after lockdown and I will certainly be making every effort to go and see it.
An era captured in a cracker of a Glasgow novel I once read, by Jeff Torrington: “Swing, Hammer, Swing.”
You can learn a little more about Oscar in the following YouTube link, narrated by one of his daughters, Marie-Claire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1SIN2GuouQ
All images Oscar Marzaroli, © The Marzaroli Collection, courtesy Street Level Photoworks