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.

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. Because I'm now living in 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. 

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.