I started taking black and white photographs with my first SLR camera whilst I was still at school. I couldn’t believe you could pour in a chemical and out came negatives. The memory of looking at those early negatives against our kitchen window on a Saturday morning still stays with me until this day.
My teachers at school were very supportive and helped me set up the Hyndland School darkroom in the toilets. I fused the school trying to wire in the safelights. I did all the official class photographs, but I was also photographing everyday life at school. I just loved it, and I knew then that photography was what I was going to do.
My parents were also very supportive and encouraged my photography. My mum loved old Glasgow and would go out with her camera – which I still have sitting on my shelf – to photograph streets that were going to be demolished. She felt the need to record these things, and I guess, in a way that rubbed off on me.
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I studied photography at college for three years and was able to focus on the documentary style of work that I wanted to. At our final year exhibition, the renowned documentary photographer, Oscar Marzaroli, was really encouraging and told me to just keep on doing what I was doing. From that, I was lucky enough to be part of an exhibition in The Collins Gallery with some big names in photography. I was a wee bit out of my depth, but I just kept working away, taking photographs of everything around me, and that’s what I’m still doing today.
There were a lot of things throughout the 80’s that I wish I had been able to photograph but couldn’t, either because I didn’t have money for film, or when I went to these amazing gigs that happened in Glasgow, I wouldn’t be allowed to take my camera in.
For years I was known as the commercial photographer that documented all the art exhibitions in the 90’s. Although I’m known for that, I don’t put big distinctions solely on my photography of the art world because I was still shooting everything else around me. And also because, the great thing about Glasgow is, that there’s so much crossover between music, art, and writing and photographing one thing always leads to something else.
What I loved most was that there was so much camaraderie between people. I was taking portraits of friends I’d met through my work, who maybe went on to be quite well known, so it was luck in a way, and it was all very relaxed. I love photographing people I know, and there’s no doubt that if I’m in a person’s company a few times, I’ll end up taking their photo, so in that way, all of my work is like a visual diary.
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I had an exhibition in 2007 at Street Level Photoworks and people were amazed by all of these other photographs that I had taken over decades, because they had only really thought of me as photographing the art scene.
The passing of time changes the way we see photographs so much. People look at my early photographs of Glasgow now and don’t recognise it as the same city. The whole atmosphere has changed. When I took a lot of these photographs I wasn’t thinking 45 years later people were going to find them interesting or amazing, I was just taking them because I loved taking photographs, but maybe somewhere in the back of my mind I could see they would be really something to look back at.
I’ve never changed the way I take photographs. I use the same camera, the same lens, process my films and make my own prints in my darkroom – that I’m also able to use to teach new photography students in, and pass on my skills. Even through the periods when black and white film photography became unfashionable, I continued to work in the same way. I’ve always tried to be truthful in the way that I photograph and be faithful to what I’m seeing in front of me.
My archive has around 130,000 images, and I still shoot two to three rolls of film a week, so it grows monthly. I’m continually working on digitising and cataloguing it. There are gaps, because around 400 negatives were stolen from my car in the 90’s, and I wasn’t going out as much when my boys were young. But at that time, I was photographing family life as I always had.
People tell me how lucky I am to have so many photographs of my mum and dad and my children, and I really see that now. Family is important to me, and it was as natural for me to photograph them as it was to photograph everything else around me. I’m still photographing my grown-up sons now as their lives unfold, and I hope all these family photographs will be a nice thing for them to have.
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This year I’m exhibiting quite a lot of work from my archive in various shows. At the moment, Island Record , is an exhibition of 46 photographs on Millport, a lot of them taken in the mid 80’s on family holidays to the island that we took every year. Millport was always an exciting place for me to take photographs and especially when I knew I was leaving school to study photography. As well as the photographs, the exhibition has some of the postcards that I’ve collected from Millport and other interesting wee objects, and some excerpts of my sister Joan’s diary from a family holiday in 1975. The response has been great because people have their own fond memories and photographs of the island and there’s been a lot of nice conversations around it.
Later this year, I’m having another exhibition of photographs from my archive at Platform in Easterhouse, that documents the joy of daytrips or ‘jaunts’ that people take around the west coast.
I’ve got this love of Glasgow, be it photographing people, architecture, different areas and how they’ve changed or haven’t changed, and people have really connected with those photographs. The idea of people being able to see my work has always been important, and as well as photography books I’ve made in the past, or exhibitions in gallery spaces, from early on I’ve exhibited work in public spaces or on street billposters to make them accessible to as many people as possible.
It’s just lovely to see folk enjoy my photography. I’m really honoured that people take an interest, and I think I feel that more now at this stage of my life than I ever did. It’s made it all worthwhile in a way. Like a lot of other photographers, I was always just working away quietly in the background, building this archive, even if I didn’t realise that’s what I was doing at the time. But I would have done it anyway because I love it. It’s really nice when you find something that feels as natural as photography does to me, I feel very fortunate.
Island Record, an exhibition of photographs by Alan Dimmick, The Garrison, Millport, Isle of Cumbrae until 26 August, entry is free. There will be an artist’s talk on Saturday 23rd August 1pm – 1:30pm. For more details, visit: Island Record.
For more information on Alan’s forthcoming exhibition, 20 September-17 January, at Platform, visit: Daytripping. More on his work and archive here.
