disproportionate amount of attention. ‘Everyone has a period like that — it just so happens that mine was the Sixties.‘ He does not think that he is a better photographer now than he was then, rather that he is ‘a different photographer’. ‘Film requires that you discipline yourself,‘ he explains, ‘now I might use half a roll of film where once I would have used ten or twenty rolls —— although that doesn‘t mean every photo is a cracker. Even the best photographers are only remembered by half a dozen pictures - ifI thought I‘d taken thirty crackers in thirty years I‘d be more
than pleased.‘
As you might expect, someone who has been so intimately involved with the city for so many years has his own thoughts on the astonishing
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changes it has undergone. The Sixties, he and his contemporaries thought a time ofwonderful change and highly exciting, ‘some of it was good and some of it bad and some of it only now being rectified. It‘s easy to criticise the Sixties with hindsight, but at the time we thought it was marvellous.‘ The Seventies, he describes as being ‘rather concretey‘ and he sees the present decade as a ‘time of reflection‘. He applauded the new ‘cultural aspects‘ of the city while disliking the term and when asked if this is the ‘real Glasgow‘ says simply, ‘why not?‘
Although his work has en- compassed everything from portraits to fashion models and landscapes to Cityscapes, his first love remains people. ‘I‘m interested in people,‘ he says, ‘I‘m not an architectural
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;e to him about photographing the city as an exhibition of his work opens at the
photographer. For example, ifyou go and photograph Edinburgh, although it has beautiful buildings, you can never be sure where the people come from. At least ifyou take a photograph in the Briggait you can be reasonably sure the people are Glaswegian.‘ Although the city has seen so much change, he does not detect much in its naturally garrulous citizens. ‘People in Glasgow encourage you to take their photographs. . . but I‘ve always been perfectly open about what I was doing. I never had the slightest bit of trouble in all the years I photographed the Gorbals and even now I‘m welcomed back . . . but, after all, they‘re the sons and daughters ofthe people I was photographing back in the Fifties and Sixties.‘
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Third Eye Centre.
Top Right: Gorbals Back Court, 1963. Top Centre: Golden Haired Lass, 1964. Far Left: Townhead Interchange, 1968. Above: Bridges on River Clyde, 1963.
As he gets older, Marzaroli confesses to a liking for the ‘permanence' of having his work collected in books. The current exhibition is to be reflected in a new book featuring 300 photographs with a commentary by William MacIlvanncy. When asked if Glasgow can. in due course. expect a fifty-year retrospective. he smiles and says: ‘1‘]! photograph it till I fall apart.‘
Oscar M arzaroli ‘Sharles ofGre)‘ — Glasgow Photographs 195m195 7' will be at the Third Eye (‘entrefrom 6 December—ll January.
The List 28 Nov — 11 Dec 7