And so I come to the end of a month-long series of images celebrating all things Glaswegian/Scottish to acknowledge Cop26, the UN Climate Change Conference.
I made this shot from Sauchiehall & Kelvin Way. With lawn bowlers in the foreground, you can see the Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum to the left and, in the distance, the tower of the University of Glasgow.
By the intersection of Buchanan & Sauchiehall, a large poster advertises a retail opportunity for a flagship store. Two women walk past, apparently unconcerned, one wearing headphones, the other staring at her smart phone. As a photographer, my primary interest lies in the fact that the pavement is wet and offers a nice reflection of the colours in the poster. It isn’t until later, much later, two and half years later to be precise, that I notice the Extinction Rebellion logo spray painted onto the poster.
Personally, I don’t like aggressive activism. I avoid confrontation and prefer reasoned debate. That may have more to do with my personality that with my view of the Extinction Rebellion’s tactics. However, I do feel a change within myself and wonder how long before I see aggressive activism as the only path forward. When debate turns to the livability of the planet and the future of my children well, then, it ceases to be a debate, doesn’t it?
A man stands in a window display and adjusts the clothing on a mannequin. Reflected in the window, we see Buchanan Street, a pedestrian thoroughfare and one of the main shopping districts of Glasgow. Apart from a couple shops that sell tartan scarves and Scottish kitsch to the tourists, most of the shops here are what you find anywhere: Apple, Starbucks, Nespresso, Prada, Hermès, Omega, The North Face, Urban Outfitters, Victoria’s Secret, GapKids. Living as we do in a global marketplace, the idea of shopping on holidays seems silly. The supply chains that bring us these products have probably circled the globe several times already, then we purchase them and fly them another 5,000 km to bring them home with us. They hang in our closets. We wear them twice. Then, when we decide they make us look fat, we run them out to Value Village.
A woman holding a cup of coffee and a cigarette walks through Glasgow’s Royal Exchange Square. A reversed sign in the archway tells me I’m in Merchant City. Thanks to a light drizzle, the pavement is wet and reflective. Although it’s mid-July, everyone wears a jacket because there’s a chill in the air. Welcome to Scotland!
Like most art galleries, museums, and historic sites in the UK, Glasgow’s Gallery Of Modern Art, GOMA, is free. When you walk through the front door to use the gallery’s washroom, you pass a statue of Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington, on horseback and wearing a traffic cone on his head. When the Italian artist, Carlo Marochetti, completed the sculpture in 1844, it didn’t include a traffic cone. Someone added that later and it has become an essential feature. Inspired by the quality of whimsy that GOMA fosters, I found art in the plastic chairs and folded tables on the sidewalk outside. A man in a hoodie and smoking a cigarette completed the image.
I captured this image on Sauchiehall Street at its intersection with Renfield Street. Although Sauchiehall is pedestrian friendly, it still requires people to deal with vehicular traffic at intersections. Here, a visually challenged person waits to cross Renfield Street while a sign on the adjacent post states: “Think Before You Step Out.”
This is reminiscent of signage in my hometown, Toronto, where a spate of cycling deaths prompted the ironically named Vision Zero program. The city developed an advertising campaign directed at cyclists to take more care on busy urban streets. It has a lot in common with “blame the victim” rhetoric. It tries to persuade the most vulnerable people on the street that it’s their responsibility to take precautions for their own safety. Meanwhile, infrastructure continues to favour the least vulnerable people on the street i.e. the people driving vehicles.
But when a sign asks a blind person who cannot see the sign to think before they step off the curb, as if thinking has anything to do with it, we note the absurdity of the rhetoric. Drivers have responsibilities too, and maybe those responsibilities should be in proportion to the harm they can do.
Cop26 gives us an opportunity to rethink the role of vehicular traffic, especially in densely populated areas. Maybe we can rethink the rhetoric, too.
I don’t know what you call this person in his morning coat and top hat. A valet? A beadle? Whatever you call him, the way he stands with his legs crossed, he looks like he has 15 minutes left before his washroom break and is doing his best to hold it in. He is facing south to Argyle Street. To his back is the Argyll Arcade. I’m not sure why the distinction between Argyle and Argyll. Apparently, in linguistic terms, there is no difference. Maybe the people responsible for the Arcade’s signage ran out of the letter E.
The marble sculpture shown above is titled Eve, created by Scipione Tadolini in the 1870’s, and displayed beneath the glass roof of the Kibble Palace in Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens. Like all good Victorian nudes, this woman’s nether regions are discreetly hidden by greenery. Had Tadolini created this sculpture in the age of Instagram, he would have blotted out her nipples, too. Ah, we live in such times!
There is something sad today in art that aspires to realistic representation. In the case of Eve, that realism is not evident in her pose, but in her anatomy. I feel the same sadness in my photography when I try, sometimes obsessively, to capture the world as it is. This desperate documentation. I feel it, too, in the glass dome of the botanical gardens whose purpose is to cultivate interesting, rare, even endangered plant species. Botanists document plant life. Expand its taxonomy. Rush to produce a complete catalogue before it’s all gone.
I imagine an alien ship touching down on the grounds of the Glasgow Botanic Gardens in a post-human world. Maybe the lawn is scorched. They step inside the Kibble Palace, panes of glass shattered here and there. All that remains of the plants are woody stalks. The leaves have fallen to the floor and are turned to dust. In the middle of the desolation sits a white marble form with unseeing eyes and unfeeling skin. This is all that remains of the human species. That and a few photos.
I’m standing at the intersection of Mitchell and Gordon Streets when a girl walks through the frame while a man smoking a cigarette approaches and gives me the evil eye. Or at least a vaguely suspicious glance.
One of the things I love about Glasgow is that, in the downtown area, there is a good selection of pedestrian-only streets. Sauchiehall, Buchanan, a portion of Argyle, the Royal Exchange Square. It makes these areas vibrant and safer. I wish my hometown would take a cue from this.
Another thing I love about Glasgow is that Glaswegians never leave you in doubt about what they think of you. They are honest. Some might say brutally honest. If Greta Thunberg decides to attend Cop26, she might find herself in a city full of kindred spirits. It’s a no-bullshit kind of town.
The conventional story holds that the plaid twills (tartans) we see in Scottish kilts are a relatively recent development from the 17th century. However, archeological finds in China of all places suggest that Celts have been weaving tartans for at least 3,000 years. But the fashion may go back even further than that. George Lucas presents convincing evidence that tartans have been around since the early days of the Galactic Empire.
Have you ever noticed that there is no sex in Star Wars? It’s implied by family lineages and we get a whiff of it in Luke’s kiss with Leia. The only overt act in the whole series is more reminiscent of West Virginia sex between siblings. I suppose Leia as Jabba the Hutt’s sex slave implies a certain quality of sex at play in the background. We see a similar arrangement in Solo with Qi’ra, which suggests Han Solo has a “type”; he needs to rescue troubled women from enslavement by domineering men (though I’m not sure Jabba the Hutt qualifies as a man). Even so, we never have any good healthy romps in the bedroom. It all gets sublimated into shooting blasters and waving light sabres. I guess that explains why Disney was comfortable buying the franchise.
This is the most sentimental photograph you are ever likely to see on this web site. If you were expecting a colder gaze from me, I apologize and promise not to do anything like this again.
This is a sign that stands at one end of the South Portland Street Suspension Bridge, a pedestrian walkway across the Clyde River in Glasgow. Maybe it upsets you that somebody vandalized the sign by painting a heart on it and the words: “i love you.” Personally, I regard the sign as a form of vandalism. It’s title is “Clyde Bridges.” We don’t need a sign to tell us that; it’s fucking obvious. All the sign does is get in the way. The graffiti is an improvement.
Nice N Sleazy is a bar on Sauchiehall Street. It’s like Brigadoon. Caught in its own special time when ideas like feminism didn’t exist.
I wonder what’s going through this guy’s head as he watches the three women pass the bar’s entrance. This is emblematic of who gets to watch whom.
It’s worth noting, however, that the women are watching something too. They’re not returning the man’s gaze. Instead, they’re watching something that lies beyond the frame.
In a way, the women are more interesting because they look to something that is unknowable. Unknowable, at least, to those of us who join the man in gazing at the women.
I’m standing in the Royal Exchange Square at the back end of GOMA, the Gallery of Modern Art, experimenting with the wet pavement and the broad curving line of the steps when a child runs up the steps and races towards me. Sometimes the photography gods are kind to me. What is particularly kind in this instance is that the girl’s parents look on, smiling, apparently unconcerned that a middle-aged man is standing there with a camera.
I offer this photograph as a reminder of whose interests we serve at Cop26. Let us never forget: our children have no voice here. We will be long gone by the time the consequences of our decisions play themselves out in full. It will be our children who suffer or benefit from those consequences.
Whenever I visit another city, I find myself inevitably drawing comparisons to my hometown. Sometimes I observe things that make me glad I live where I do. In Glasgow, for example, I’m struck by the relative cultural and ethnic homogeneity of the local population. I come from a city where more than half the population identifies as a visible minority and where more than half the population was born in another country. As odd as it may seem, I find it disturbing to enter a space where most everybody looks like me. Difference is a comfort.
At the same time, Glasgow has many features to commend it, including the availability of public lavatories. This strikes me as a sensible response to a homogeneity of a different sort: we are all alike in our need to pee. Stuck right in the middle of town, near the intersection of Buchanan Street and St. Vincent Place, is a great black behemoth where people can find sweet relief. Toronto has no such public facilities. As I have documented elsewhere, Toronto is hostile to the idea of the public lavatory. City politicians fret that homeless people might sully their fine facilities so they prefer to deny them to everyone than to share them with people of all stations.
I haven’t visited Glasgow since the global pandemic gripped us, so I can’t say if that may have changed the Glaswegian approach to public facilities. I hope not. There is something heartening about a town that frankly acknowledges (and answers) a universal human need.
Beer kegs on the sidewalk is pretty much the norm for Glasgow. Perhaps the most famous of the local breweries is Tennent’s located at the foot of the Glasgow Necropolis. I’ve often wondered where they source their water. Do they take it locally, filtered through the hills of the Necropolis? Does that give their beverages a special flavour?
