Exhibition Review: Steven Berkoff, Gorbals 1966, Street Level Photoworks

In 1966 a young man stood by the Citizens’ Theatre with a hand held camera and began photographing the streets of old Gorbals and the people who lived there. The series of photographs made by Steven Berkoff “over a period of a week or two” was the latest attempt by a long line of photographers to document the “appalling decay” of the area. It was in fact a hopeful period of regeneration following the Housing Act (Scotland) of 1954 that required councils to undertake slum clearances. Everything Berkoff photographed lay within ten minutes walk of the Citizens. 

In 1868 a young man stood by the Tolbooth Steeple with a large camera on a tripod and began photographing the streets and closes of old Glasgow and the people who lived there. The series of photographs made by Thomas Annan over the next three years was the world’s first serious attempt at social documentary photography. It was in fact a hopeful period of regeneration following the 1866 City of Glasgow Improvement Act that introduced enforced slum clearances. Everything Annan photographed lay within ten minutes walk of Glasgow Cross. He did head south over The Clyde once, to make a picture of the Gorbals.

In 1961 Queen Elizabeth herself came to the Gorbals to see with her own eyes the latest social improvement project within her realm. The showpiece of her visit was a scale model of Sir Basil Spence’s twenty storey slab blocks that were replacing the tenements. These flats themselves suffered chronic dampness and infestation and were demolished in 1993. Nevertheless, at the very time Berkoff made his photographs, the Gorbals regeneration was an ongoing utopian project. 

There is no sign of regeneration in Gorbals 1966. Berkoff’s photographs show somewhere that is run down and barely holding on. We see the Citizens' Theatre, pubs, derelict newsagents, desolate tenements with smashed windows, a betting shop, public baths and a pawnbroker. It reads like a documentarian’s checklist for an impoverished community. The photographs are darker than those made a few years earlier by Oscar Marzaroli and Joseph Mackenzie, who both included in their pictures aspects of the New Gorbals being built up around the old in the early sixties. Although offering little hope for the future, Berkoff’s small time capsule of photographs emanate a sense of empathy. 

Looking closely at Berkoff’s photographs one is left with the impression they were shot over the course of three or four wanderings and even fewer rolls of film. Although there are only thirty-five prints in the exhibition, adults, children and buildings recur. One elderly man leans out of his window shot from different viewpoints in four separate photographs, (five in the publication that accompanies the exhibition). In Berkoff’s East End Photographs of his native East London we see intimate studies of individual characters made close up. In Gorbals 1966 there is a distance between the photographer and his subjects, except with some of the children whom he has very likely asked to pose. 

There is an interesting rhythm to the picture making. Berkoff moved quickly through the busy main streets holding his camera both vertically and horizontally and sometimes totally skewing those horizontals. He followed people as they walked or sometimes paused and photographed them as they passed near then far. In the back streets he moved more deliberately. His eye was grabbed by the old man in the window, whose eye in turn was grabbed by the sight of the bulldozer just along his street that was steadily eating its way towards his home.

After fifty years hidden away, these photographs do not emerge with a big reveal about the Gorbals. They are of public interest as much because of who made them as because of their content. They do not add a lot to the more substantial bodies of work made by Marzaroli and Mackenzie. The photographs can however be read as an interesting vignette on Berkoff himself. You can feel the young actor photographer’s footsteps marching down Gorbals and Portugal Streets, imagine his quick switching of the viewfinder to his eye and his gentle cajoling of kids from the playground out into the street to drag on a cigarette for the camera. Although he is never in the picture frame you can sense the photographer’s energetic presence in these particular photographs. 

Then there is poverty, the pinnacle of all oppressions. It can be seen in photographs of Glasgow today just as easily as those of Berkoff’s from fifty or Annan’s from one hundred and fifty years ago. What is the point of dragging up these old photographs? Does it objectify those who are disadvantaged and allow us to feel safe or even superior? Would it have been better to leave those troublesome black and white prints in an unopened drawer? As long as we do not look with foolish eyes it is both worthwhile and necessary that we do keep on looking, trying to understand what poverty is, where it comes from and how to resist it. The gap between rich and poor was still becoming smaller in 1966, but today it is widening grotesquely and that warrants our close attention. 

Images © Steven Berkoff