Wednesday, May 29, 2024

The other side of the city

Glasgow and Edinburgh are often perceived as two very different cities - the former gritty, grimy, resolutely working class; the latter a genteel, well-heeled honeypot for visitors. But perhaps that's just because of how they're regularly portrayed in images and on screen.

Certainly, that would be the view of photographer Graham MacIndoe, who in the 1980s deliberately set out "to document the real Edinburgh - the ordinary people in the working-class parts of the city, away from the tourist attractions ... My photographs were a bit of a backlash against Colin Baxter who did all the picture postcard stuff - that wasn't an Edinburgh that I associated with."

MacIndoe's Edinburgh, by contrast, was one of concrete tower blocks, Alsatians patrolling the flat roofs of pubs, kids making their own entertainment in the streets and stoical Scots trying to get a tan on the beach at Portobello - as illustrated by this gallery on the British Culture Archive site.

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