Thomas Annan set up a studio as a professional photographer in Glasgow in 1855, where he produced portraits, architectural studies, and reproductions of artworks. He is best known for his photographs of the city’s slums prior to their demolition in the 1870s. Commissioned by the Glasgow City Improvement Trust in 1866, Annan’s project indicates growing public concern for the poor and dispossessed. The resulting albums, titled The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, are widely recognized as milestones of nineteenth-century documentary photography.
Owing to long exposure times and insufficient light, the narrow streets appear deserted, still, even haunted. In fact, the area—once dominated by wealthy tobacco and fish-curing merchants—was severely overcrowded with immigrants, chiefly from the Scottish Highlands and Ireland, who flocked to the “second city of Empire” in search of work. The average life expectancy in these slums was a dismal twenty-seven years. Annan’s albums were initially produced in limited numbers for the City Improvement Trust. A larger edition, printed in 1878, was circulated to institutions. Finally, in 1900, Annan’s son, James Craig Annan, made this larger posthumous edition for open sale.
Britt Salvesen
2024
