posted on 26 Jul 2016

Gorbals Children by Joseph McKenzie

Joseph McKenzie died in 2015 at the age of 86. For many he is the ‘father of Scottish photography’  and a great educator in the art form – he established the photography department at Dundee University’s Duncan of Jordanstone Art College after having been a lecturer at St. Martin’s School of Fashion back in the 1950s.

McKenzie had a distinctive style and only ever worked in black and white after having honed his skills as a photographer in the post-war RAF from 1947 – 1952. When he left the RAF he went on to study photography at the London College of Printing.

Although he was the first photographer to be awarded a grant by the Scottish Arts Council, his work was increasingly controversial because of his subject matter. The focus of his interest was the urban decay he saw all around him in the late 1950s and 1960s and he set about recording the lives of people who found themselves trapped in slum housing and desperate financial circumstances. However, despite the obvious social conscience that lay behind this body of work, he did not fall into the trap of making the photographs unremittingly grim – there’s plenty of humour to be found here too and an unquenchable human spirit reverberates through the pictures.

He was one of the first photographers to hold exclusively photographic exhibitions and in 1965 to great acclaim he took his display of  Gorbals Children on tour across Scotland. He followed this up with portraits of Dundee and Dunfermline and courted more controversy with an exhibition, Hibernian Images, which compared the lives of  young people in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

This collection of Gorbals Children  was published in softcover  in 1990 by Richard Drew Publishing of Glasgow and they have done an excellent job of it. The plates are given their own full page and so there isn’t too much crowding of the material and the photographs have space to breath. There is a brief preface by Frank Worsdall who is, himself, an expert local historian specialising in issues relating to Glasgow but other than that it’s all about the pictures.

Copies are quite hard to find now but there are the odd one or two available on the internet but you need to be prepared to pay over £20 to get your hands on a copy.

 

Terry Potter

July 2016