Lot 390: Annan, Thomas

Annan, Thomas
Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow. [c. 1868-1872], large folio, 31 mounted albumen prints by Thomas Annan, printed list of photographs, each photograph with printed caption on label affixed to lower corner, no printed title-page, contemporary green half morocco portfolio, lettered on upper cover 'Glasgow Improvements Act. 1866. Photographs of Streets, Closes &c. taken 1868-71'

print sizes varying from 275 x 225mm to 380 x 310mm

Note: The earliest and most comprehensive photographic record of Glasgow's slums and a pioneering social record documenting the plight of the Scottish urban poor.

The industrialisation and rapid population growth in Glasgow had led, by the mid nineteenth century, to overpopulated and squalid urban living quarters in the heart of the city. When the City passed the Glasgow City Improvements Act in 1866 which authorised it to destroy the slums of the City Parish Thomas Annan was appointed to record the character and conditions of the old town prior to demolition.

Using the sensitive wet collodion process in order to create negatives of sufficient quality despite low light level conditions in the narrow wynds and courts Annan took thirty to thirty five photographs between 1868 and 1871, producing two editions from the wet collodian negatives. The original and much rarer edition, consisting of 31 prints, used the albumen process and were created in very limited numbers in 1872. In 1877 Annan produced a much larger edition using Joseph Swan's carbon print process consisting of 40 prints. Carbon prints were faster and cheaper to produce and more resilient than their albumen predecessors but lacked their clarity and warmth of tone. The Paul F. Walter copy, sold at Sothebys 10 May 2001 for £20,000, comprised 40 carbon prints, as did the copy sold by Phillips de Pury in New York, 22 April 2004, for £66,000. The present copy has all the 31 albumen prints listed at the front of the volume. The copy in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, now with the prints mounted separately, comprises 30 (of 31) albumen prints. Two of the prints in the present set differ however from the SNPG copy. Plate no. 11, Close no. 115 High Street, is taken from further to the left and plate number 31, Main Street Gorbals from Rutherglen Loan, has additional figures watching the photographer from the street corner and a second cart in the left of the picture. Plate no. 3 in the present copy (High Street from the Cross) is in landscape format, giving a wider view, whereas in the SNPG copy the plate is in portrait format and shows the top of the bell tower. It is clear that Annan took more than one photograph of the same scene and printed from both negatives on different occasions.

M. Frizot, The New History of Photography, Cologne, 1998, pp.348-49; M. Haworth-Booth (ed.), Exhibition catalogue, The Golden Age of British Photography, 1839-1900, London, Victoria & Albert Museum, 1984, pp.142-145; G. Fairfull-Smith. Thomas & James Craig Annan of Glasgow, 1999.

Provenance: Faculty of Procurators in Glasgow, book-label and book-plate.