Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland, has the nickname “The Dear Green Place”. For anyone who has spent time in this lively and colourful city they know at times it can be a cold, hard and bleak place. Dear Grey Place has been an ongoing project that I have been working on since 2017, documenting the people of this enchanting city with all its quirks, love and turmoil.

I grew up 30 minutes from Glasgow in a small village but the draw of the “big town” snared me. Firstly I fell in love with the bustling music scene, from big bands rolling through every week to play the world famous venues, down to the local bands cutting their teeth in the bars. The city felt so alive and with a nightlife to match it. I grew to know the people and before long the locals couldn’t tell I hadn’t grown up in the southside myself. My country mannerisms and speech fell by the wayside except from when a few libations were down the gullet. This had become my city and the people had become my people.

Having come from a small village, the grandeur and eccentricities of Glasgow fascinated me. The outrageous behaviors and excess were abundant, like a soap opera unfolding on every corner, yet no one was stopping to watch the stories unfold. I started taking photos of the scenes people would walk past, the people that made this city alive. An obsession began.

Over the past 8 years I have walked the streets of Glasgow photographing the mundane, the beauty and the outrageous.

The city is home to over 635,000 people and has seen its share of change over the years. From an industrial hub of the modern world, manufacturing most of the British Empire’s ships, to being a trailblazer of art, music and progressive thinking. This is a city of many pasts and with it comes a clash of ideals. The hardened lives of families on the brink of poverty to the lives of excess and opulence.

In my work I have tried to show the people of Glasgow without comment and judgment. The good and the bad, which exists in every community.

When documenting the streets of Glasgow I usually opt for a close and personal feel. I try to get as embedded in the scene as I can. Shooting mainly with 28mm or wider, I feel the close and raw nature of the people in my work shows the scenes unfolding as truly as they do in person. I take great care not to attract attention or “bruise the scene”. This for me is vitally important as I do not want to alter the actions or expressions of these real people in their real lives. Too often a lens will be pointed at a scene and forever change its outcome, people altering their features or body language to fit an idea of acceptable behaviour. I want to capture these interactions without interference. With this comes some hurdles to consider.

Using flash is off the cards completely. The ability to freeze the moment is amazing but as soon as you fire off your first shot the scene is forever tainted, irreconcilably changed as the knowledge of outside observers recording the happenings will dictate how people proceed. Standing in an area for too long has the same effect, until you have been there so long that you become invisible to the people around you. The window to document the scene can be fleeting, you must be patient but not overstay your welcome.

My choice of equipment has been carefully considered. The Fujifilm X Pro2 is small, discreet but powerful. The ability to quickly change to electronic shutter at the touch of a button for silent shots has been one of the groundbreaking things in my work. I have moved from larger autofocus lenses to smaller m-mount manual focus lenses to limit my footprint and reduce focusing errors as all of my shots are prefocused.

Like any public art form, you can fall afoul of offending people. I try my hardest to stay away from deliberately unflattering images but honesty and transparency is paramount in my work. If someone notices I am taking their image I am usually met with nothing more than a glance but on the occasion people feel the need to confront me, I have an ace up my sleeve. In my pocket I carry a small 3×5 inch booklet of my work. After explaining what I do and showing them this I’m almost always met with questions of intrigue rather than hostility. It has diffused a lot of situations that may have gone sour if I had fumbled with a phone trying to show someone my Instagram to justify why I just took a photo of them.

Overall, I try to document real people in real life situations. This has become increasingly hard due to public sentiment toward street photography changing here. Tiktok has become a widely used platform for people taking photos on the street to post their work but due to the algorithmic nature of the app, these photographers are forced to shoot and upload almost daily which drives down the quality and authenticity of the work in my opinion. This has led to outcry from locals who are seeing unknowing street portraits, usually taken with a 85mm or longer lens, plastered on their timeline every day. Most of these images have no artistic message or meaning and most people see them as very intrusive and voyeuristic. This has made a lot of my recent interactions more tense, taking away from the candid and free nature of my work.

I foresee this issue to only get worse as “street photography” becomes more popular to young photographers who maybe lack the direction and tact of someone more seasoned, leading to Glasgow being more closed off and it’s people jaded. Close friends of mine have been driven offline by threats of bodily harm and harassment for daring to show their work on these platforms. Luckily, I have not personally attracted any of this backlash. I attribute this to choosing where I share my images carefully. My website hosts a selection of my work and my Instagram page has regular updates but I do not advertise this page or share it on places like Facebook where people who might not appreciate the work for what it is and may see it as “creepy” or “predatory”. Street has always walked a fine line between exploiting the public and creating artistic work for the public. I think as we move forward in this ever more connected world, we will start to see more of a sentiment shift to rejecting public documentation like mine.