Thomas Annan

Thomas Annan was commissioned by the Glasgow City Improvement Trust to photograph old closes and streets marked for clearance under nineteenth-century urban reform^*1. Intended as evidence to justify demolition, his photographs became some of the earliest powerful records of urban poverty: dark lanes, hanging laundry, cobbles, and working-class residents facing the camera in spaces about to disappear^*2. Long before Riis in New York, Annan showed how a civic record could turn into testimony about social conditions. His work remains important both for the history of documentary photography and for the visual history of industrial Glasgow^*1.