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Off-Site Exhibition

Hugh Hood - Glasgow 1974-78

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Platform, The Bridge, Glasgow.

Artist talk: Hugh will give a talk on his work on Wednesday 14th January 2015, at 2pm. 

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.” [© Allan Brown, 2013, for Document Scotland].

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.

http://hughhood.com/

A limited number of signed photozines 'Glasgow 1974-78' published by Cafe Royal Books are available from the box office at Platform and at Street Level.

Platform, The Bridge, 1000 Westerhouse Road, Glasgow G34 9JW.  T: 0141 276 9670

Opening times: Mon - Fri 9am-8pm, Wednesdays 9am-5pm; Sat & Sun 9am-5pm

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