It’s the mid-1960s, Beatlemania is at its height and four familiar faces peek out through the gap in a woman’s overcoat in this photograph by Joseph McKenzie, taken in the Gorbals area on the south side of Glasgow. She looks very fashionable in her Beatles paper dress, a trend at the time, and yet the woman isn’t the main focus here, nor is the man in the leopard-print jacket to her right. Instead, McKenzie brings us down to child’s-eye level and shows us the girl in the striped jacket, cane in hand, the smile on her face as wide as her dress is tatty. The photograph, part of his marvellous series Gorbals Children – three of which are included in Still Glasgow, an exhibition at the city’s Gallery of Modern Art – is known as Beatle Girl.
McKenzie was a Londoner who worked as a photographer in the RAF before moving to Dundee in 1964 to teach photography. Inspired by paintings of Glasgow street children by the artist Joan Eardley, he travelled to the Gorbals, a densely populated neighbourhood undergoing major redevelopment, and spent a year or so photographing local kids.
New high-rises were shooting up in the area and the grand old tenements, many of them in disrepair, were being torn down, to McKenzie’s dismay. As a child, he had witnessed buildings being flattened in London’s East End during the Blitz and, according to McKenzie’s son Frank, who manages his late father’s estate, he viewed what was happening in the Gorbals as “mindless destruction” which would do little to raise living standards in the area.
Despite all the deprivation he witnessed, however, McKenzie was struck every time he visited the Gorbals by “the joyous and happy nature of all the kids”, according to Frank. The photographer’s affinity with them is evident here and in many of the other photographs in the 330-strong series. “When you look at the images, [you can see that] the children are warming to him,” says Frank. “It’s almost like he’s one of them. He gets down to their level, and I think the kids really appreciated that.”
Still Glasgow is at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art until 13 June 2027
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