Depth of Field
12th April - 29th June 2025
David Eustace, Oladele Bamgboye, Alan Dimmick, Stewart Shaw, Agnes Samuel, Leslie Black, Robert Burns, Roger Farnham, Sarah Mackay, Kay Ritchie and Sandy Sharp
Reception: Saturday 12th April, 2-4pm
This exhibition includes a diverse range of photographers whose involvement in Glasgow Photography Group (GPG) between 1987 and 1989 underpinned the practical and conceptual raison d'être, leading to the establishment of Street Level Photoworks in September 1989. As a collective (as it would likely be termed today), that common objective of establishing a permanent centre for photography in the city, became its watershed moment with Glasgow’s impending accolade as European City of Culture in 1990. The work in the exhibition includes a range of photographic practice undertaken before, during, and after the intense lifetime of GPG, with many bodies of work presented in a gallery for the first time and others rediscovered or resurfaced after a lengthy hiatus.
Internationally renowned photographer David Eustace quotes ‘We keep passing unseen through little moments of the other people’s lives’ from The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert M Pirsig) in his publication ‘Ego’, as a philosophical metaphor for his approach to a series of portraits of actors, musicians, artists and other known faces. These images are selected by him from a much larger body originally shown at The Gallery in Cork Street Gallery in 1997. These fibre-based prints were printed immaculately by Eustace in his darkroom and demonstrate his prowess not only as a photographer, but also as a printer, and they also represent some of the last fibre prints he made as he moved to New York City at the end of the 90s as his career blossomed. Included are portraits of Robbie Coltrane, Eve Arnold, Yasmina Reza, Gina Bellman, Robert Carlyle, Ewan McGregor, Albert Watson, George Mackay Brown, Ronnie Wood, and many more.
Nigerian born Oladele Bamgboye is part of a group of Nigerian/British artists – including Rotimi Fani- Kayode, Yinka Shonibare, Chris Ofili and the theoretician Olu Oguibe - who made their mark in London during the 90s. His experiments in large format darkroom prints in Glasgow in the late 80s and early 90s (along with fellow artist at the time, Anne Elliott) embody his exploration of self in domestic spaces, whilst commenting on the experience of diaspora, with underlying themes rooted in the challenges that cultural displacement poses to identity. Shown in the first GPG show in early 1988, Bamgboyé’s work was included in Catherine David’s Documenta X (1997) as well as many exhibitions foundational to the now central discourse around our relationship to “the Other”. The exhibition includes five works from this period.
Being shown for the first time, Agnes Samuel’s landscape portraits are from a time in 1988 when she and her friend, artist Bet Low, drove to South Ronaldsay in Orkney. Whilst Bet painted, Agnes explored the tranquil landscape of the island. Having recently bought a camera, she was encouraged in her photography by Robert Burns, a fellow GPG stalwart, who would develop her films and print her images. It was this which prompted her to set up her own darkroom and to continue working in photography. Whilst Agnes worked as Executive Director at Glasgow Opportunities, an initiative designed to address the economic downturn and support cultural revitalisation, she made the space available as a gallery for the second GPG exhibition in 1988. Two of her portraits of Bet Low were recently shown in the exhibition ‘Bet Low – An Island On Your Doorstep’ at the Reid Gallery, Glasgow School of Art.
In the early 80s, Kay Ritchie embarked on her photography career, with one of her first jobs being to photograph an array of contemporary giants for the title sequences of ‘Voices’, which went out on the newly launched independent Channel 4. It questioned modernity & its discontents, and amongst the people she got the opportunity to photograph were Stuart Hall, Kathy Acker, E.P. Thomson, Noam Chomsky, John McGrath, Lindsay Kemp, Susan Sontag, and Salman Rushdie. This will be the first showing of this work since they were shot in 1982/3.
Leslie Black’s work is a slice through some of the artists, actors and patrons in the Glasgow arts scene at the turn of the 90s – including Steven Campbell, Calum McKenzie, Johnny Taylor, Eirene Houston, as well as miscellaneous snapshots from her unrecorded archive. Again, this will be the first time these have been scanned and presented in an exhibition.
The tropes of street and documentary photography are embraced in the work of Stewart Shaw and Alan Dimmick. Stewart’s series from the 1980s encapsulate his keen eye as a street photographer combining humorous juxtapositions of people in environments alongside moments which capture signs of the times – Aids billboard, Glasgow’s Miles Better gable end, the launch of the Norsea ferry on the Clyde, an unrepeatable moment in the history of Clyde shipbuilding. Whilst he is better known for his candid shots of people involved in Glasgow’s art scene, Alan Dimmick’s works precede this and were started when he was a teenager in 1979, covering a period up to 1991, many of which appear in two recent photozines by Café Royal Books. These include candid moments of everyday life and the spontaneous interactions that take place in the ‘blink of an eye’.
Similarly, Roger Farnham’s series records the changing urban environments of the East End of Glasgow, with scenes devoid of people, similar to the empty streets during lockdown. This series was taken between 1987 and 1990, when Roger was an active member of GPG, which he unearthed recently and will form the basis of a forthcoming self-published book. ‘Regeneration’ is a theme embraced in Sandy Sharp’s work ‘Another World’, the focus of which is the former steelworks of Ravenscraig in his former hometown of Motherwell, Lanarkshire – with the black and white images acting as a eulogy for a lost industry, whilst the colour works signalled renewal and nature’s return.
The works by Robert Burns are from his series ‘A Window on Ukraine’ and offer distinctive observations and reflections of the country over several years from his first visits there in 2007 onwards. Views of other places are also captured poetically in Sarah Mackay’s ‘Roman Empire’ (1990/1991), where the past is embedded in the remnants of statues, pantheons and colosseums that remain of that empire, and which attracts tourists the world over.
For more information on Glasgow Photography Group click here to read an interview with Street Level Photoworks director Malcolm Dickson.
Banner Image: Arise © Oladele Bamgboye.
Left Image: Eve Arnold © David Eustace | Vogue | Condé Nast