Alan Dimmick has been photographing Glasgow for over 45 years, particularly the city's art scene. However, two new zines on the prestigious Café Royal Books reveal a lesser-known side to his work.

They document the years 1978 to 1999 and are a time capsule of incidental details such as advertisement hoardings and vintage cars. By using the same technology across decades—black and white film in an Olympus OM-1 camera—the photographs possess a timeless quality, enhanced by Dimmick's eye for composition.

Dimmick's previous coffee table book, released by Stills Gallery in 2018, was crammed full of images—sometimes as many as seven to a page—so I was curious about his selection process for these zines.

“It was easier than you might think because it had to be pre-2000 and it had to be Glasgow. Craig [Atkinson, publisher of the series] really knows what he wants and he takes a big part in curating and editing. He said ‘Alan, I really love your gritty Glasgow streets’ and highlighted a few that he'd seen from Bridgeton where I had been going to college.”

Born in 1961, Dimmick studied photography at the College of Building and Printing which had an annexe in Bridgeton. I was curious about what drew him to take photos of these places.

"It's hard to remember exactly what I was thinking, but I was photographing stuff that other 18-year-olds would not have been … I recently found a nice shot of my mum’s dirty dishes which had a beautiful light."

It was Dimmick’s mother who kindled his interest in photography. For instance, she had Oscar Marzaroli's books at home.

"Yeah, my mum had all his books. I met him around the time I was at college, and he was encouraging … but when I looked at his books of Glasgow, I thought they were a bit cheesy.”

How did she have all these photobooks?

“She was interested in Glasgow. She also bought Douglas Corrance's books and they were even more cheesy. In one of his books, there's a photograph of the front door where my mum was the nanny. My mum wrote him a letter which he said moved him to tears. Every time he does a talk, he relives this letter and what it meant to my mum. It was a big change for her, coming from the orphanage to Glasgow, and then being in the West End and looking after all these kids. It must have been weird to see that in a book."

In the zine, there is a photograph of a diverse group of schoolchildren from Willow Bank Primary. It reminded me of Oscar Marzaroli's Castlemilk Lads.1 How did that come about?

"I was doing a college project about the area and thought I should go to the school. I just rang the doorbell and said ‘I'm a final-year student. Can I take some photographs?’ And they said ‘Here you come, no problem.’ The kids were hilarious. After I took that, I slipped on the ice and they all jumped on my head."

Social media is full of nostalgia, with accounts like Lost Glasgow and Past Glasgow ransacking the archives for evocative images. What is different about Dimmick's photographs is that they never feel sentimental. What, I wondered, does he think about this nostalgia?

“Nostalgia's a tricky word. It can conjure up things that are a bit sad. When I look at photos of old Glasgow, I get excited about the way things were historically. But I like change. I like to see how things have changed. I never say ‘Ah, things were so much better back then.’ Were they better? You were at a different stage in your life! I'm at an age when it is easy to dive head-first into the mire of nostalgia. I like looking at Google Street View and if I've got a photograph I took a long time ago, I like to look at really obscure things, like the way the stone has worn or how trees have changed. I don't know if that's nostalgia. I do worry that people might just sum up these photographs as nostalgia. It's only because they were taken at a different time. But people can learn by looking at the past.”

Nowadays, when we think of Glasgow in the early 80s, we might think of Raymond Depardon who was sent on an assignment in Glasgow having just got back from a warzone in Liberia. There is a common narrative that Glasgow was going through a bad time in the 70s and early 80s. But, actually, things don't look that bad in Dimmick's photos, certainly not compared to Raymond Depardon.

"When I was young I was looking at things that surprised me, but I wasn't looking at total dereliction. I did photograph the odd gap site and one or two down-and-outs, but I'd never been interested in printing them up."

One of my favourite photographs in the collection is from the Glasgow Garden Festival in 1988. Did the Garden Festival feel like an exciting new thing?

“Yeah, it did. Maybe not for me at that age—I was 26—but it was a big thing for the city.”

And how do you feel about Glasgow now? Because there's a lot of negative narratives about the state of the city at the moment.

“I don't know if that enters my psyche or changes the way I photograph things. It upsets me that the cost of living seems to be super high. Glasgow looks different but I don't think it has changed the people. I photograph things that interest me. I don't let external political things have an effect on the way I see things. Maybe that's the problem: I record things the way that I like to."

I have been in conversations recently where people have said that you shouldn't delete anything because it becomes more meaningful over time.

“That's certainly true for me. I didn't throw negatives away, but I have returned to them you've got a different view on things and can edit in a different way. When you're younger you look at things that are a bit obvious and maybe you don't look closely enough. I completely ignored things.”

“Glasgow 1978-1983” and “Glasgow 1982-1999” are available now through Café Royal Books. Alan Dimmick is also part of Depth of Field, a group show at Street Level Photoworks.