Photo by Thomas Annan. Photogravure now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Thomas Annan was a Scottish photographer active in Glasgow in the mid to late nineteenth century, and around 1868 he was at the height of his importance. By that time he was already an established professional, known for architectural, industrial, and civic photography.
In 1868 he began the work for which he is now best remembered: photographing the old closes, wynds, and narrow streets of Glasgow that were about to be demolished under the city’s Improvement Scheme. Commissioned by the City Improvement Trust, Annan recorded these areas not as moral spectacle but with a calm, exacting eye.
The images show tight stone corridors, scarce light, wet cobbles, and buildings worn by overcrowding. When people appear, they are incidental and unposed, absorbed into the space rather than staged.
Technically made using the wet collodion process and printed as albumen prints, the photographs required long exposures and careful preparation, contributing to their stillness and gravity.
Although intended as municipal documentation, the series later published as Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow is now regarded as one of the earliest and most powerful examples of urban social documentary photography, preserving a cityscape that vanished almost immediately after Annan recorded it.
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