Description:
Outdoors; street; brick houses
Label Text:
The Scottish photographer Thomas Annan was among the first to use photography for documentary purposes. In 1868, he was commissioned by the Glasgow Improvement Trust to create visual records of the city slums slated for demolition by parliamentary decree. The photographs, published in 1871 as The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, document the squalid living conditions of an overcrowded working-class population about to be displaced from their homes.
Annan transcended the challenges of dim lighting and the restrictively narrow passageways between tenement buildings, producing photographs of astonishing technical achievement. Close, No. 148 High Street juxtaposes the sensuously-rendered textures of the stone façade and the hanging laundry. The sense of confinement is heightened by the brightly lit doorway opening into the street at the opposite end of the close. Like Whistler and William Henry Fox Talbot, Annan here adopts spatial perspectives and motifs from seventeenth-century Dutch painting.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1991.9 |
