ABSTRACT
Thomas Annan’s celebrated photographs of Victorian Glasgow are often compared to other photographic representations of nineteenth-century urban poverty: for example, Jacob Riis’s photographs of the east side of New York. The particular nature of Annan’s work, however, is best understood in the context of, first, the development of early Scottish photography and, second, ethnographic representational practice in the British Victorian city. In light of recent discoveries of new work by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson (detailed in a major exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and a subsequent book by Sara Stevenson in 1991) Annan’s work can be seen as a kind of mirror-image of what is now regarded as the explicitly ideological mission of the Edinburgh photographers. Previous work on Annan and ethnographic images of Glasgow, however, has tended to impute a spurious intentionality to the work of writers and reformers. Thus, in social histories, the complexity of the ideological 196discourses of improvement and charity are neglected in favor of a simplistic opposition between working and middle class or capitalism and social reform. Partly because of this, Thomas Annan’s photographs of urban Glasgow have proved an enigma for most commentators because of Annan’s absolute silence regarding the political or social consequences of the project. Instead of struggling, ineffectually, to probe Annan’s intentions, we should instead look at his work in a Foucaultian sense as a particular ethnographic practice brought to bear upon its subjects. 1 Strangely, in this context, Annan’s Old Streets and Closes, first published in book form in 1878, can be seen not as a progenitor of social reform, but as a result of it. The photographs themselves, taken immediately before the demolition of the High Street slums, were constructed by an intense Victorian curiosity about the inhabitants of the inner city. In ethnographic terms, the “other,” or the foreign, marginalized element of their own people. In one way, then, the Annan photographs, almost from their inception, are interpolated through a powerful nostalgic gaze.
