Despite what I have just written with regard to my tutor’s feedback on the Assignment 4 essay, I already find myself looking at it again! What has brought it back into focus is leafing through a little book that I bought recently, effectively a catalogue of an exhibition put on by Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow of the work of Oscar Marzaroli.
I have known Marzaroli’s work for some time, but it did not really come to mind when working on the essay. At the time, because of the relative breadth of his subject matter, and the way his work is often presented simply as street photography influenced by the likes of HCB, it did not seem to fit my thesis. This recent exhibition (which I did not see) and the accompanying book though have changed my view. By focusing on work that he did in Glasgow it puts his work there in a different light. These are predominantly pictures of Glaswegians rather than Glasgow itself. Whilst his aesthetic was very different from that of William Klein, it nevertheless now strikes me that Marzaroli actually did something similar for Glasgow: by portraying the city’s people he was showing us something of the city itself, as it was in the 1960s in particular, a city that has long since ceased to exist, both socially and physically. To that extent it might be said that this element of his work fits the thesis I was exploring in that essay.
It also adds to my question about the role of, or the importance of being, an “outsider”. Like Klein in New York, he was a native of Glasgow, but did his work there after an absence of a number of years in Sweden and London.
Regardless, it is good to see this work again, which is warm and deeply sympathetic, and deserves to be better known in its own right. In turn this makes me realise that Tish Murtha was also doing something similar with her work on the west end of Newcastle (another returnee after time away from her home region, after studying with David Hurn in Newport). Why that did not occur at the time is beyond me! Perhaps I am going to find something similar when I revisit Jimmy Forsyth’s work.
Dickson, M, (2020). Oscar Marzaroli. Glasgow: Street Level Photoworks
Murtha, T, (2018). Elswick Kids. Liverpool: Bluecoat Press
Murtha, T, (2017). Youth Unemployment. Liverpool: Bluecoat Press
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