The Annans of Glasgow: From the Old Closes to the Art of Photogravure

established claims rest on the surviving photographs and editions, the firm's records, contemporary exhibition catalogues and modern scholarship, especially William Buchanan's 1992 study of James Craig Annan for the National Galleries of Scotland. shared claims involve interpretation, for example of the meaning of particular photographs. traditional claims are repeated but not documented.

The weak points are these. The Old Closes photographs were made for a council committee planning demolition, not as a campaign against poverty, and some modern accounts misread their purpose. Dates for individual Craig Annan prints sometimes differ between captions and texts: his Stirling Castle is dated both 1903 and 1906 in the same book.

Thomas Annan and the old closes

established Thomas Annan trained as a lithographic writer and engraver on the Fife Herald before moving to Glasgow, where he set up as a photographer in the mid-1850s. He built a reputation for photographing paintings, buildings and engineering works. He photographed David Livingstone in 1864, and in 1866 he reproduced D. O. Hill's vast painting of the 1843 Disruption as large carbon prints, using the Swan process for which he had just bought the Scottish rights.

established Under the Glasgow City Improvement Act of 1866, the city's trustees planned to demolish many of the crowded closes and wynds around the High Street, Saltmarket and Gallowgate. Between 1868 and 1871 they commissioned Annan to photograph them. His long exposures emptied the streets of moving figures but caught washing lines, puddles, open drains and people standing still in narrow, dark closes. The photographs were issued in albums in 1871 and 1878–79, and in a photogravure edition in 1900.

shared Historians now treat the series as one of the first sustained photographic surveys of urban poverty. It was, however, a record made for the authorities who were clearing the closes, not a reforming exposé.

James Craig Annan and photogravure

established James Craig Annan studied chemistry and natural philosophy at Anderson's College in Glasgow. In 1883, aged nineteen, he went with his father to Vienna to learn photogravure from its inventor, Karel Klíč, who had kept the method secret. Photogravure transfers a photographic image to a copper plate, which is etched and printed like an etching. The historian Michael Roschlau explains that the plate can then be worked by hand, highlights burnished and blacks deepened, which made it attractive to artists. The Annan firm became the leading gravure printers in Britain and later printed many of the plates for Stieglitz's Camera Work.

established Craig Annan began exhibiting as an artist in the early 1890s. In 1892 he toured the Netherlands with his friend the etcher D. Y. Cameron, and the pair showed their work together as "etchings and monotones", avoiding the word "photograph". On a Dutch Shore and The Beach at Zandvoort were reproduced in journals across Europe and America. He was elected to the Linked Ring in 1894, and his work was shown by Stieglitz's Photo-Secession and published in Camera Work.

shared The historian William Buchanan stresses two sides of his art. He was a master of instantaneous composition: Annan wrote that he watched ploughing oxen "furrow after furrow" before making an exposure, and Buchanan compares this with Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment". Yet he then spent long hours reworking the gravure plates, softening their detail. His later works, such as The Dark Mountains and Stirling Castle, are sombre and mysterious; D. Y. Cameron called his work "reticent, reserved, weird and tenderly beautiful".

The 1901 exhibition and Glasgow's art world

established For the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901, Craig Annan assembled a photography section of about 500 works by 201 photographers from a dozen countries, visiting Berlin, Brussels, Dresden, Hamburg, Munich, Paris and Vienna and asking Stieglitz to choose the American section. The photographs hung as works of art in the new Kelvingrove art gallery alongside paintings and sculpture. Buchanan notes that most of Stieglitz's selection became the first exhibition of the Photo-Secession in New York the following year.

shared Annan was part of Glasgow's artistic revival as well as its recorder. He photographed the Glasgow Boys, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Margaret Macdonald and the embroiderer and suffragette Ann Macbeth, and Buchanan argues that his portrait of Mackintosh created the designer's public image. The firm's profits from the exhibition paid for new premises at 518 Sauchiehall Street, designed by John Keppie, with ironwork by Mackintosh.

Hill and Adamson's heirs

shared The Annans kept the work of Hill and Adamson alive. Thomas bought the contents of Hill's Rock House studio in 1869 and printed the calotypes in carbon. His son remembered meeting Hill as a child and looking through albums given to his father by Hill's widow, and later made photogravures of the calotypes. Buchanan sees Hill and Adamson's portraits behind Craig Annan's own, including his celebrated Janet Burnet (1893), which was exhibited from Buffalo to Brussels.

• James Craig Annan learned photogravure aged nineteen from its inventor, Karel Klíč, in Vienna in 1883.
• Annan and the etcher D. Y. Cameron exhibited their 1892 Dutch work as "etchings and monotones", avoiding the word "photograph".
• At the 1901 Glasgow exhibition photographs hung as works of art in the new Kelvingrove gallery; three years later the St Louis Exposition refused photography a place in its arts building.
• The Annans' 1903 premises at 518 Sauchiehall Street were designed by John Keppie, with ironwork by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

• Myth: the Old Closes photographs were a campaign against poverty or slum landlords. They were made for a council committee planning demolition, and were a record for the authorities who were clearing the closes, not a reforming exposé.
• Myth: James Craig Annan invented photogravure. He learned it in Vienna in 1883 from its inventor, Karel Klíč, who had kept the method secret. The family firm bought the British rights.
• Disputed: when the Old Closes were photographed. The article dates the series 1868–71, while the 1878–79 album is titled as taken 1868–1877.
• Disputed: the dates of individual Craig Annan prints. Captions and texts sometimes differ. His Stirling Castle is dated both 1903 and 1906 in the same book.