Close, No. 193 High Street

Thomas Annan was one of the first documentary photographers. In 1868, he was commissioned by the City of Glasgow Improvement Trust to document the city’s slums prior to their imminent demolition and reconstruction. This picture shows the back of a tenement behind High Street in the part of the city where the majority of the overcrowded slum housing was located. Tenements like this one were usually three or four stories high and entered by a “close,” which offered access to the common staircase and back courtyard. The photographs that Annan created between 1868 and 1871 were published together in the collection The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow (1900). In the introduction to the collection, British author William Young writes, “The value of many of the plates embraced in this volume consists in their true presentation or suggestion of the seamy side of the city’s life; in their depicting with absolute faithfulness, the gloom and squalor of the slums.”