An extraordinary new exhibition shows Glasgow as it is and how it used to be. Have we learned the lessons of the change, asks Mark Smith

I suppose the one that stays with me the most is the picture of the man in the doorway. We can’t know his history now – the picture was taken more than 30 years ago – but what we do know is that he was staying at Glasgow’s Great Eastern Hotel, a name that belied its true nature: it was a flophouse for men who’d run out of options, led there, and kept there, by alcohol.

Another of the pictures that lingers is the one at the top of this article: a group of boys returning from a game of football via the giant grey buttresses on Basil Spence’s famous/infamous flats in the Gorbals. In some ways, it feels like a picture from the sort of future that we imagined in the 60s and 70s – utopian (and the boys clearly won their game, they’re happy). In other ways though, it feels like a picture from a past betrayed – dystopian (the flats were hellish to live in and were torn down). Either way, it’s quite a picture.

Fyi, the picture of the man in the doorway of the Great Eastern Hotel was taken by the great American photographer Jane Evelyn Atwood, who spent several days at the place in the early 1990s documenting what she saw. The picture of the boys in the Gorbals meanwhile, that was the work of Eric Watt, the famous teacher-with-a-camera who spent his days taking pictures of his home town and the people in it, the everyday chronicler of everyday Glasgow.

Both the pictures are featured in a new exhibition that opens at the Gallery of Modern

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