Still Glasgow: The photography exhibition celebrating a city 'full of hope and resilience'
Marking the 30th anniversary of Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Still Glasgow covers nearly 80 years of photographic documentation of the city, writes Katie Bruce
Still Glasgow opens on Saturday at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow. An exhibition with photography from Glasgow Life Museums’ collection at its core, it begins its run as celebrations of Glasgow 850 – the anniversary of the city becoming a burgh – draw to a close. It will remain open throughout 2026, GoMA’s 30th anniversary year.
Still Glasgow is not intended to be a definitive portrait of the city, but it does explore how photographers and artists have documented those spaces where we work, live and gather in order to highlight living conditions and argue for social change. It documents a city full of hope during the period of post-war regeneration, and a city that, despite facing challenges over the decades, is full of the joy, friendships and resilience of the young.
GoMA opened to the public in 1996 and is part of Glasgow Life Museums, whose mission is to connect people, objects and places. It has spent the last 29 years as a unique, and at times eclectic, institution that supports a world-class visual arts sector in the city. From the outset, collecting, exhibitions and public programming reflected different aspects of Glasgow’s local and global connections, with social justice as a central theme.
This continues today as the museum responds to a changing city to create a programme of creative and curious exhibitions, events, workshops and projects for our visitors that connect to their lives. I started working here in September 2002 and with this coming anniversary I realised I have been here now for over three quarters of its history; some works in this show are like old friends that I am excited to see on public display again, such as Frances Gordon, Glasgow Teenager by Alasdair Gray and works from The Great Eastern Hotel by Jane Evelyn Atwood.
It is an immense privilege being a curator at Glasgow Life Museums. We are able to work on exhibitions for our venues drawing from an incredible public collection amassed over 170 years and cared for by wonderful colleagues in collections management, conservation and logistics. Works not on display in one of Glasgow Life Museums’ seven venues are stored at Glasgow Museums Resource Centre (GMRC) on Glasgow’s southside.
Part of my role is to support access to contemporary art when requests to see particular works come in from members of the public. In 2023, the director of Glasgow photography gallery Street Level Photoworks, Malcolm Dickson, asked to see some photographs by Jane Evelyn Atwood, Nick Danziger, Alan Dimmick, David Eustace, Oscar Marzaroli and Joseph McKenzie as part of his research towards a programme for Glasgow 850. While these works did not go on to feature in the recent Street Level Photoworks exhibitions Depth of Field and The Scene from Within, having a chance to see these works usually held in archival boxes in the store sparked the genesis of a collection show with Glasgow and photography at its core.
Fast forward to late last year, and the opportunity arose to curate a show from the collection that would be part of a programme celebrating 30 years of GoMA. The idea for Still Glasgow was born. You will see many of these artists on our walls. Photography is always popular in the museum, forming part of collection shows in the past.
For a long time, I was only considering photography for this exhibition but Gobstopper, Roderick Buchanan’s video work featuring children holding their breath as they are driven through the Clyde Tunnel, was impossible to ignore and worked delightfully in the final room of the show.
The discovery of John T Thomson’s Glasgow Past and Present - a composite of drawings of all things Glasgow to celebrate Glasgow's 800th anniversary made by the former deputy principle of Cardonald College - behind other stacked prints in a store (and realising it was created for Glasgow 800 in 1975) led to it quickly entering the mix for works in the first room, disrupting initial plans for a purely photographic venture.
Anniversaries are often a moment for reflection. Still Glasgow covers nearly 80 years of photographic documentation of Glasgow in the city’s collection. It emerges from some of those renowned images of a city defined by certain works such as The Gorbals Boys and The Castlemilk Boys to daily life captured through the archive of Eric Watt (a member of the Queen’s Park Camera Club) alongside more recent acquisitions including a series of photographs from women at Glendale Women’s Cafe and Iseult Timmermans’ documentation of 10 Red Road Court before its demolition. It has works by people born and bred here (highlighting home-grown talent), alongside those who moved into the city and those who visited – interested by what stories Glasgow could tell.
Katie Bruce is a producer and curator at GoMA
Still Glasgow is at GoMA, Glasgow, from 29 November until 13 June 2027 , see www.glasgowlife.org.uk
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