Photo Zines and Book

Gourock, Greenock, Glasgow

This is a book-length compilation of the first three zines described below, dealing with Greenock and its relationship to the other two places indicated by the title.

Greenock/Gourock

I live in Gourock; I go shopping in Greenock. I walk around Gourock; I travel to Greenock by bus. This zine is about the differences and similarities between the two places.

Gourock (current population 10,000) was originally a fishing village, then a seaside resort, and is now a suburban residential area. It has a few shops, but no real economy. Rather, people travel from there to work, mainly by car. Some no doubt have jobs in Greenock, but others commute to Glasgow, which is about an hour away on the motorway. I rent a room here, but the area where I live is mostly a zone of owner-occupation, with detached or semi-detached houses set back from the street by gardens. However, Gourock also has several areas of public housing, which are more densely inhabited and have more generic architecture.

Greenock (current population 41,000) is a larger regional centre, with local government buildings for Inverclyde Council, a shopping mall, chain supermarkets, etc. But it is itself a satellite of Glasgow, and its nineteenth-century prosperity depended on that proximity: that is, it is closer to the mouth of the Clyde Estuary than Glasgow, so it was easier and cheaper for some ships to unload sugar, tobacco and cotton there rather than continue on to the larger city. The town was also a centre for shipbuilding and related industries. Like many Atlantic ports and old industrial centres, Greenock’s fortunes have fallen, but it retains a busy freight-container terminal – and during the summer cruise ships use the town as a base for day trips. Greenock has greater visible extremes of wealth disparity than Gourock, with larger council estates, including tower blocks, but also very grand individual houses, most of which seem to date back to the town's heyday.

Suburbia is a place where dogs bark at solitary walkers. Being without a car and being alone are both inherently suspicious states of being – taking photographs is even worse. If I could completely efface myself, I would. I live a marginal existence, and I wanted these photos to express that: to depict not an invasion of privacy, but a reluctance to trespass. A sense of distance and withdrawal – of tactfulness.

Fifty

I recently moved into a Housing Association flat in Greenock, a small post-industrial town near Glasgow. When I counted up, I realised that this is the fiftieth place I’ve ever lived, which – since I’m in my mid-fifties – averages out at just over a year per location. The longest I’ve ever stayed in one place was in the house where I was born, for the first eight years of my life, followed by my aunt’s house in Liverpool, where I lived during my time in secondary school from 1981–8, and again for several months in 1998. The longest I’ve stayed anywhere as an adult was a rented flat in Sydney from 2006–11. I’m still surprised to have ended up in Greenock, but I’m glad to have an apartment to myself after several years renting rooms in shared accommodation. Because it’s a Housing Association flat, I can stay here as long as I want. So I’m trying to get to know my town: to relearn what it might mean to inhabit a place.

Greenock Central to Glasgow Central

Train windows were the original screen technology. Long before the invention of cinema, they offered an endlessly scrolling spectacle to a seated passenger, who could not touch, enter or otherwise affect the world beyond the glass. The photographs in this zine were taken on train journeys between Greenock Central and Glasgow Central stations during February 2025. It might seem odd to think of these images in terms of spectacle, since that word normally implies something impressive or dramatic, and mostly what they show is the reverse of things. Back gardens, industrial estates, brownfield sites – along with the infrastructure of the railway itself: bridges, power lines, and so on. But in many respects photographing from a train window is like photographing a cinema screen. On previous projects, I moved around a possible subject on foot, looking at it from different vantage points, and I often returned to the same site multiple times. Here, I couldn’t change my position, except insofar as the train itself carried me along. At most I could choose which side of the train I sat on, or which direction I faced. Or I could adjust my angle of view, for example with a zoom lens.

There were other constraints. I sometimes had less than a second to frame and photograph a subject moving past me at up to 90 mph, and if I missed it, the only way to have another go was to retake the same journey. In addition, the window glass, usually rather dirty, worked like a giant Vaseline filter, and, even worse, often held intrusive reflections from the train interior. When moving at fast speeds, there were also far narrower tolerance limits for focus and shutter speed than normal. Under these circumstances, it was necessary to redefine what a ‘good’ photograph was: it became one that invoked the experience as much as one that described the subject. To put it another way, the constraints became part of the subject.

A Zone

A Zone is a photographic survey of the neighbourhood where I lived from 2018–21 – close to Glasgow city centre, in the shadow of the Kingston Bridge and M8 flyover. 

This area includes a wide variety of different sites: the various tributaries and slip roads of the M8 and M74; the ‘leisure complex’ of Springfield Quay arranged around an enormous car park; budget hotels; several retail or industrial parks; brownfield areas and construction sites; small offices for businesses of the sort that don’t need or attract walk-in customers; a couple of car dealerships; a homeless shelter in a nineteenth-century building that used to be a public library; takeaway restaurants; and so on.

Not a neighbourhood then: a zone. Neglected by planners, shoppers and tourists alike, it offers a sample of all the kinds of activities we usually ignore in the modern city.

Aldo and Aldous

My friends Harry and Ieva live with their young son Aldous and their two cats Clyde and Felix in a large house built in the 1970s by two Italian migrants to Scotland named Aldo and Raffaella, who stayed there for many years and raised a family. After Raffaella died, Aldo remained alone for several years until his own death in 2018, after which the house lay unoccupied until Harry and Ieva bought it in 2021. When they moved in, it still contained much of the furniture and décor from Aldo and Raffaella’s time here. These photographs are about the encounter between Aldo and Aldous: two people who never met, but Aldous is discovering the world in a home still shaped by the love of Aldo and Raffaella.

I'm still considering how best to make all these titles available.