Information and discussion on all aspects of British photographic history
Time: December 15, 2014 at 9am to January 25, 2015 at 6pm
Location: Platform, , Glasgow G34 9JW
Street: 1000 Westerhouse Road
City/Town: Glasgow G34 9JW
Website or Map: https://maps.google.com/maps?…
Phone: 0141 276 9670
Event Type: exhibition
Organized By: Malcolm Dickson
Latest Activity: Dec 15, 2014
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Hugh began his photographic “career” at the age of 10, by helping his father develop black & white prints at the family home. He attended Glasgow College of Printing and around 1972 he bought his first Creative Camera magazine and was influenced by images by Lee Friedlander and Robert Frank. It inspired him to photograph the streets of Glasgow, which are captured in this body of work from this period 1974-1978, a unique period in Glasgow’s social and architectural history when half of the the city’s tenements were being demolished and the other half undergoing transformation and construction. This Glasgow was a ‘frazzled interzone’ as the writer and journalist Allan Brown has written, which Hood’s images reflect without ‘sentiment or nostalgia’:
“This Glasgow was a city of ghosts and rubble, its air a miasma of sandstone dust and occluded sunlight. Hugh’s work was local history reframed as National Geographic anthropology… Every totem and trope that made up Glasgow’s visual sense of self was present and correct: the tenements, the cheeky wee boys, the Gorbals back courts, the cranes on the river… Yet the work had to it no civic dimension, it contained nothing that was cherishably Glaswegian, nothing quaint or beguiling: just frank and unblinking assessments of a vanquished city, nursing its shattered jawlines, awaiting the deliverance of some far-distant modern day.” (1.)
After moving to London in 1980, Hood ‘lost’ all of his 35mm negatives, but luckily they resurfaced again in 2006 at his brother’s house in Glasgow from where the process of scanning and uploading to his website began. Hugh settled in London in 1983 after studying Film and Photographic Art at the Polytechnic of Central London. He currently works as a Director-Cameraman on documentary films for television.
(1.) © Allan Brown, 2013, for Document Scotland.
A handout with an essay by Allan Brown is available.
Hugh Hood ‘Glasgow 1974-78’ has been produced by Street Level Photoworks. More information here
Victoria and Albert Museum's photography collection
National Science and Media Museum
RPS Journal 1853-2012 online and searchable
Photographic History Research Centre, Leicester
Birkbeck History and Theory of Photography Research Centre
William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné
British Photography. The Hyman Collection
The Press Photo History Project Mapping the photo agencies and photographers of Fleet Street and the UK
The correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot
Historic England Archive
UAL Photography and Photography and the Archive Research Centre
Royal Photographic Society's Historical Group
www.londonstereo.com London Stereoscopic Company / T. R. Williams
www.earlyphotography.co.uk British camera makers and companies
Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock.
National Portrait Gallery, London
http://www.freewebs.com/jb3d/
Alfred Seaman and the Photographic Convention
Frederick Scott Archer
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