Own Art: Street Level Photoworks

Recent months have neatly captured and conveyed the multi-faceted nature of our programming – from our contribution to GENERATION with the collected works of Wendy McMurdo, plus a diverse series of photography projects in public locations and offsite venues, including the Commonwealth Family Album, and the more participatory Caravan Gallery, whose portable gallery on wheels intersected with community locations across Glasgow. This all worked to ensure that a range of audiences could encounter quality photography work on the street, or in the more pristine environment of the gallery. It's all about audience development, which ultimately has a knock on effect – be it visiting the gallery, joining a course, buying a photograph. And coming back for more.

The Commonwealth Family Album was devised with Festival 2014 to present a series of photography works in public places, looking at the edges on priority routes around the city during the Games time. Its broad aim was to show works which we felt were a good fit with the theme of celebrating people who make up the Commonwealth today, across different facets of daily life. The work was varied, from David Gillanders' portraits of boxers in Glasgow's East End, to a 50m collage of photography from Cranhill Arts' Glasgow Family Album, Alex Rotas' portraits of Master Athletes, Lucy Aston Holmes Queer Windows… A limited selection will be available to buy in our shop in due course.

We’re gradually adding special editioned prints from relevant exhibitions to the shop, such as the melancholic yet contemplative works from Martin Hunter's Forth & Clyde series, Johan Nieuwenhuize's abstract colour tone pieces in _IMG, and Wendy McMurdo's edition. 

We’re working with a couple of photographers on special editions which we will give a focus profile to – for example, some fabulous still lives by young artist Kotryna Ula Kiliulyte, atmospheric rugged landscape works from Alex Boyd... These and more will unfold over several months and we will have some special events to draw attention to them. 

We will continue to stock regular items in the photography of Harry Papadopoulos, David Peat, and Hugh Hood. It takes a considerable period of time to get sales going in photography especially – we are not on the fashion bandwagon and we are neither a supermarket nor a shoe shop that needs to change its products every week. Art has a different import which is not fickle or transitory – it is long lasting and the development of a market starts with the individual buyer and their liking for a work of photography.