Hugh Hood 'Glasgow 1974-1978'

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.

www.hughhood.com

(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