Spin: Glasgow visit the studio of acclaimed photographer, Alan Dimmock. This is what Moira Jeffrey has to say about his work:
‘People make art, form bands, fall in love, tie their hair into new styles and drink beer. They go to the beach, watch seagulls, fall over. Children play their own mysterious, inexplicable games. Generations link hands. Lichen grows over stone. The machar blooms in springtime. Alan Dimmick has been there for more than twenty years, recording it all in quiet monochrome. A wedding, a funeral, the stretch of cheap fabric on awkward adolescent bodies on school sports days, glittering city lights seen from the metal-framed window of a high rise block.
His body of work explores the poetry of time passing, over the years familiar faces recur, fringes go up and down, teenage fleshiness melts away to expose sharp cheekbones. Babies grow up. Parents grow old. There are birds everywhere, beady-eyed cocking their heads, scavenging, roosting, coolly observing. Hanging in a tree outside a whitewashed house on a windswept Scottish coast is a white buoy, with a word painted on it in thick black letters: boy. Strange fruit indeed.
Dimmick’s work also tells an extraordinary story about the Glasgow and its artists. Alasdair Gray grasps his bunnet and blinks against a scarred city wall. Young painters pose their studios. At Transmission Gallery, artists gather to talk and preen and laugh or sweep the floor silently, before the talking and the preening and the laughing begin again. Dimmick has been so woven into the fabric of this community of artists as friend, collaborator and documenter of art work that sometimes his own art has gone unnoticed. It has all crept up on all of us just how important and unique his bittersweet memoirs have become.’
