By making his images of the lively streets of Glasgow in the 1960s, David Peat became part of a practice almost as old as photography itself.

We do not know the name of the first person to be a photographer in a street, but we do know where and when they created that image. The subject was standing still; had he not been so his image would not have registered, such was the length of exposure required to make a Daguerreotype. He was in the Boulevard du Temple in Paris in 1839 having his boots blackened and while all the hundreds of people around him were in movement and therefore invisible to the camera, he became unknowingly immortal.

Most of David Peat’s subjects were not known by name either, although a few have come forward to recognise their childhood selves; and not all were unconscious of the photographer’s presence as was the monsieur in the Boulevard du Temple. But the principle remains the same. With or without the subject’s conscious consent, the pho-tographer of the street scene seizes the moment in time and in a public space.

Technology has always been a major factor in determining the relationship between photographer and subject. Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s cam- era on its tripod, high in the window of a Paris tenement, and the hand- held 35mm Leica of 1925, were of the same species, but their capacities to engage with life on the streets were entirely different.

Nineteenth-century street photographs by Hill and Adamson in Edinburgh, Annan in Glasgow, or John Thomson in London, required a considerable degree of organisation and on-the-spot manipulation and they could not be made instantly or clandestinely.

Spontaneous, informal photographic capture only became possible much later. When it did, it unleashed the genius of Atget, Lartigue, Kertesz, Moholy-Nagy, Doisneau, Cartier-Bresson and many others, and that was just in Daguerre’s Paris. Equally, New York has enjoyed its photography on the street from Weegee and Elliott Erwitt to Bruce Davidson and William Klein; and much could be said of other cities and photog- raphers around the world.

Our photographic perception of Glasgow has been similarly enriched, but paradoxically by the very poverty of certain areas of the city, uncomfort- able as that might seem. As Gorbals and some other areas reached the end of their physical and social viability, they attracted photographers of exceptional ability who found that the very distress of the urban context highlighted the humanity of those who lived there.

Even before the demolitions began, Margaret Watkins, Humphrey Spender, Bert Hardy and Bill Brandt had made great work there. By the 1960s, when the clearances were fully underway and long-established communities in process of dispersal, they had been joined by Oscar Marzaroli, Joseph McKenzie, Roger Mayne, George Oliver, Harry Benson, and David Peat.

In truth, the portrait of Glasgow that emerges, the souvenir of a time not so very long past, wonderfully records for ever the humanity of the photog- raphers, just as much as it does of their subjects.

Text by David Bruce

The late David Peat was an award winning cameraman, director and photographer recognised in his native Scotland with a Bafta for outstanding contribution to his craft. In the 1960s when first applying for work as a cameraman he needed to build up a portfolio and these striking images of street photography, taken in the Gorbals at the time, are the poignant result. The parallels with Joan Eardley's paintings and drawings of street urchins during the same era in Glasgow are self evident.