Best known for his photographs of apartheid-era South Africa and his work at Drum, Jürgen Schadeberg also produced a substantial documentary archive in Britain. In Glasgow in 1968, he photographed the Gorbals while demolition, rehousing and modernist reconstruction were occurring at once, keeping his attention on the people whose ordinary lives continued through the upheaval.
On Lawmoor Street, three women move through a newly built housing scheme with prams and young children. The brickwork behind them is regular and recent; the gestures in front of it are improvised and familiar. One child reaches across the pavement while another is carried forward in a high-sided pram. The photograph does not announce itself as an image of urban policy. It shows the practical business of getting through the day.
Photographer
Jürgen Schadeberg
Body of work
The Gorbals, Glasgow
Location
Glasgow, Scotland
Period photographed
1968
Photo © Jürgen Schadeberg, all rights reserved.
Jürgen Schadeberg made the picture in Glasgow in 1968, at a point when the old Gorbals was being dismantled and another district was being constructed in its place. Tenements stood beside cleared ground. Demolition sites became temporary play spaces. New housing promised light, bathrooms and relief from overcrowding, while the clearance programme dispersed thousands of residents across peripheral estates, new towns and other parts of Scotland.
Schadeberg photographed this transformation at street level. His sequence moves between mothers and children, rubble, shops, bookmakers, cafés and public houses. Buildings matter throughout, but he rarely treats architecture as an autonomous subject. The physical city is made legible through the ways people use it: pushing a pram, drawing on a wall, watching television over a drink, waiting at a counter or crossing a landscape that has ceased to be fully old and is not yet securely new.
The Gorbals photographs belong to a much larger body of work made by a photographer who repeatedly moved between countries, political systems and social worlds. They also reveal a British archive that remains less familiar than his photographs of South Africa, despite the seriousness and breadth of the work he produced here.
Jürgen Schadeberg was born in Berlin on 18 March 1931 and grew up under National Socialism and during the destruction of the Second World War. He trained at the School of Optic and Photo Technology in Berlin and worked for the German Press Agency in Hamburg before leaving for South Africa in 1950, aged nineteen.
He arrived shortly after the National Party had begun formalising apartheid.In September 1951 he joined Drum as an official photographer and layout artist, later serving as chief photographer, picture editor and art director. The magazine became one of the most consequential sites of Black South African journalism and visual culture in the 1950s. It reported political resistance, forced removals, labour exploitation, jazz, literature, crime and metropolitan life at a time when the state was enforcing racial separation across every part of society.
Schadeberg photographed the Defiance Campaign, the Treason Trial, the destruction of Sophiatown and figures including Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Yusuf Dadoo, Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela and Henry Nxumalo. Yet Drum’s achievement was collective. Its writers included Can Themba, Es’kia Mphahlele, Henry Nxumalo, Nat Nakasa and Lewis Nkosi; its photographic culture also included Bob Gosani, Peter Magubane, Ernest Cole, Alf Kumalo and others who developed distinct practices of their own. Schadeberg’s senior position gave him an important role in the magazine’s visual production and in the darkroom training of younger photographers, but the history should not be reduced to the work of one individual.
He left Drum in 1959 and continued as a freelance photographer. By 1964, after arrests, police harassment and the increasingly restrictive conditions in which he was working, he left South Africa for London. The move changed the political and geographical setting of his photography without removing the questions that had preoccupied him: who occupies public space, how social hierarchy becomes visible, and what happens to ordinary life when institutions seek to reorganise it.
Schadeberg’s British period is sometimes compressed into a brief interval between his South African careers. The record is more substantial. After arriving in London, he edited Camera Owner for approximately a year and then worked for Sunday supplements and international magazines. His later movements took him through Spain, Africa, the United States, Germany and France, so Britain was not an uninterrupted place of residence. It was, however, a sustained photographic subject from the mid-1960s into the 1980s.
When he returned to London in 1973, he combined freelance work with teaching at the Central School of Art and Design. He directed Inside Whitechapel, a project bringing students and established photographers into one East London district, and in 1976 worked with an international group of students on The Quality of Life, presented in association with the opening of the new National Theatre complex. His British exhibition history included a retrospective at the Central School in 1976, Village Faces at the Hayward Gallery and Face to Face at AIR Gallery in 1977, A Portfolio at Southampton University in 1980, and London Scenes at The Photographers’ Gallery in 1981. He returned to The Photographers’ Gallery in 1995 with Sof’town Blues.
The scope of the work is apparent in Great Britain 1964–1984, published in 2011. Schadeberg moved between dock workers, students, pubs, markets, theatres, public ceremonies and the lives of the affluent. He photographed cultural figures and members of the establishment, but he also returned to subjects that magazine assignments could pass through too quickly. His archive therefore resists a single picture of post-war Britain. It contains glamour, privilege and public performance, but it is grounded in labour, housing, social interaction and the unequal conditions under which people occupied the same country.
The National Portrait Gallery now holds eight of his portraits, including Kenny Lynch, Joan Littlewood, Donald Wolfit, Victor Lownes, Tyrone Guthrie, Harold Pinter and Kenneth Tynan. Made during the same British period as the Glasgow work, these portraits demonstrate the social range Schadeberg described: a photographer could move from a Mayfair club or theatre rehearsal to a bookmaker, dock, café or damaged street without treating one world as more inherently worthy of attention than another.
By the time Schadeberg arrived in Glasgow, the Gorbals had already carried a powerful national reputation. Overcrowding and poor housing were real. Industrial growth had drawn generations of migrants from the Scottish Highlands and Ireland, as well as Jewish refugees from persecution in Europe. Tenements were subdivided, many families lived in one- or two-room homes, and inadequate maintenance intensified already difficult conditions. But the district was not adequately described by the word slum. It was a socially complex part of Glasgow with its own businesses, religious institutions, streets, networks and forms of neighbourliness.
In 1957, Hutchesontown and part of the Gorbals became Glasgow’s first formally approved Comprehensive Development Area. The designation gave the Corporation extensive powers to acquire land, demolish housing and rebuild at scale. Across Glasgow, twenty-nine areas were eventually marked for comprehensive redevelopment. The programme sought to clear almost 100,000 dwellings and relocate a majority of the affected population elsewhere.
The demographic change was enormous. Between 1961 and 1971, the combined population of the Gorbals and Hutchesontown wards fell from nearly 45,000 to just over 19,000. Some residents obtained new homes within the district; many others were moved to Castlemilk, Drumchapel, Easterhouse and Pollok, to new towns including East Kilbride and Cumbernauld, or farther across Scotland. For families leaving overcrowded tenements, an indoor bathroom, additional bedrooms and open space could represent a substantial improvement. Yet shops, schools, transport and community facilities often arrived slowly in peripheral schemes, while the dispersal itself fractured longstanding local relationships.
Photo © Jürgen Schadeberg, all rights reserved.
Modernist redevelopment carried both practical hope and institutional confidence. Basil Spence’s Hutchesontown C scheme translated tenement features such as shared drying space into elevated balconies and slab blocks. The architecture promised an ordered future but later became associated with damp, difficult maintenance and wind exposure; the blocks were demolished in 1993. Schadeberg’s photographs precede that later judgement. They record the point at which the project of replacement still appeared unfinished, uneven and contested.
The strength of the Gorbals sequence lies in this interval between clearance and settlement. Schadeberg did not produce an architectural survey, nor did he simply collect evidence of deprivation. He photographed how people continued to organise life while the ground around them was changing.
Children recur throughout the work. They climb through demolition sites, play among broken timber and masonry, pose in borrowed clothes, smoke, draw on tenement walls and move through streets in which adult systems of safety and supervision appear partial. These photographs should not be sentimentalised as images of lost freedom. The rubble was dangerous, and the conditions that produced it were political. Yet the children are not passive symbols of poverty. They test, occupy and temporarily redefine spaces whose official purpose has collapsed.
Photo © Jürgen Schadeberg, all rights reserved.
The images of women and prams carry another kind of historical information. They register the labour of care and the scale at which redevelopment was encountered: not as an abstract plan, but as kerbs, crossings, entrances, distances and the daily movement of children. In one frame a pram stands prominently before a scarred tenement landscape; in another, several prams pass the ordered façade of new housing. The repetition makes the promise of a future visible without asking the viewer to accept that the new environment had already resolved the social consequences of the old one.
The shops, cafés, bookmakers and pubs are equally important. They formed part of the district’s social infrastructure: places for credit, news, routine, work, drinking, betting, waiting and conversation. In the pub photographs, men sit beneath a television, lean along the bar, drink sherry or occupy sparse rooms in which wallpaper, furniture and glassware are recorded with the same attention as faces. Schadeberg neither turns them into types nor treats the interiors as picturesque remnants. He allows small gestures and distances between people to describe the institution.
Photo © Jürgen Schadeberg, all rights reserved.
Photo © Jürgen Schadeberg, all rights reserved.
Photo © Jürgen Schadeberg, all rights reserved.
Schadeberg understood his work in Britain as a counterweight to the period’s dominant media image. The idea of Swinging London condensed a real cultural shift—new music, fashion, satire, theatre and forms of youth visibility—but it was always partial. It could not account for the whole country, nor for the persistence of class division, poor housing, insecure work and racial discrimination.
Jürgen: “I tried to photograph daily life, the ordinary and the mundane, rather than the glitter and glamour. It was a moment when colour magazines were just emerging, and I began working for The Observer Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine, and The Weekend Telegraph. Although this was the euphoric era of swinging London, I found that side of society uninspiring and superficial. I focused on everyday life, which for me was more interesting and often neglected by the media.”
This quote explains why the Gorbals mattered within his British work. Glasgow was not selected as an opposite to London in a simple north-versus-south argument. It belonged to a wider attempt to move across the social field and to photograph experiences excluded from the decade’s most exportable image.
Britain in 1968 was marked by contradictory forms of change. The Race Relations Act extended legal protection against discrimination into housing and employment, while the Commonwealth Immigrants Act tightened entry controls in the same year. Enoch Powell’s Birmingham speech intensified racialised public debate. Public institutions spoke the language of modernisation and equality at the same time as access to housing, employment and national belonging remained sharply unequal. In Glasgow, comprehensive redevelopment expressed a comparable contradiction: the state could improve material conditions while also breaking up neighbourhoods through the scale and administration of clearance.
Jürgen: “Alongside the superficial glitz emerged satire, with irreverent shows such as Beyond the Fringe and That Was The Week That Was, which made fun of class, race, social issues, and the conventional British way of life. My work allowed me to cross cultural divides and jump from one social extreme to another. It was a time when personal computers, cell phones, and fax machines didn’t exist, leaving more room for social interaction than today.”
Schadeberg’s reference to satire is retrospective but revealing. Beyond the Fringe and the BBC’s That Was the Week That Was helped make established authority available for public ridicule. His photography operated differently, through accumulation rather than performance. It placed institutions, interiors and social behaviour beside one another and allowed the contrasts to remain visible.
Photo © Jürgen Schadeberg, all rights reserved.
Photo © Jürgen Schadeberg, all rights reserved.
Jürgen: “It was easier to access people and buildings and therefore take photographs, since there was no need for high-security checks. Photographers today have a greater difficulty taking documentary photographs, which is the reason for the surge in contemporary photography, an artificial medium removed from reality. Viewing these images from a historical perspective will possibly give a clearer idea of lifestyle changes.”
Schadeberg’s criticism of contemporary photography is deliberately broad and should be read as his position rather than as a neutral description of the medium. Its more durable point concerns access. His photographs depend on physical proximity: entering a pub or bookmaker, standing close to children in the street, moving through workplaces and institutions, and remaining present long enough for the scene to become more than an illustration of a prior idea.
That proximity does not make the photographs transparent truth. Documentary images are authored evidence. They are shaped by where the photographer stands, whom he approaches, which moment he chooses, how the negative is printed, how the frame is captioned and how a sequence is later assembled. Historical interpretation therefore requires both trust in what the image records and scrutiny of the conditions under which it was made.
The Gorbals series is especially valuable because it can be read alongside municipal plans, population records, architectural history and the memories of people who lived in the district. None of those sources is complete by itself. Schadeberg’s photographs contribute something the official account cannot: the visual density of the transition as it was inhabited—clothing, posture, street surfaces, commercial signs, prams, drinking glasses, damaged walls and the distance between bodies in a room.
Seen now, the photographs do not simply show what Glasgow has lost. They help explain how a city was remade, what forms of life persisted through the process, and why improvement cannot be measured only by the replacement of one building type with another.
A later photographic view of the district appears in Toby Binder’s work in the Gorbals and other working-class communities in Scotland, made in 2004
Photo © Jürgen Schadeberg, all rights reserved.
Schadeberg’s international standing rests above all on the visual history he constructed in South Africa, but his British work has also entered national collections and exhibition histories. The National Portrait Gallery acquired his portraits and included him in its 2012 display First Exposure: Photographs 1961–2010. In 2014, the International Center of Photography awarded him the Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement Award. Leica inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2018, recognising a career that extended across more than seven decades.
These honours confirm the scale of the career; they do not by themselves explain the importance of the Glasgow photographs. That importance is located in the work’s precise attention to a historical process that affected tens of thousands of people. Schadeberg photographed the Gorbals neither as a spectacle of ruin nor as evidence for an uncomplicated story of progress. He stayed with the people living in the gap between those accounts.
Jürgen Schadeberg died at his home in La Drova, Spain, on 29 August 2020, three months after British Culture Archive first published this selection. The original feature had been developed directly with Jürgen and Claudia Schadeberg. After its publication generated new interest, Jürgen returned to the archive and identified further Glasgow photographs for BCA. The resulting body is larger than the group shown here and deserves to be understood as a coherent record of Glasgow in transition.
British Culture Archive first published Jürgen Schadeberg’s Gorbals photographs on 24 May 2020, accompanied by commentary supplied directly by the photographer. The feature and gallery were developed in correspondence with Jürgen and Claudia Schadeberg, and the Schadeberg archive subsequently supplied additional Glasgow images after Jürgen revisited the negatives in June 2020.
South African History Online: Jürgen Schadeberg
South African History Online: Drum Magazine
Jürgen Schadeberg Estate: Official website and archive overview
International Center of Photography: 2014 Infinity Award: Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement
Glasgow Life / Mitchell Library: Comprehensive Development Areas
The Glasgow Story: Neighbourhoods: post-war redevelopment
The Glasgow Story: Hutchesontown housing
Canmore / Historic Environment Scotland: Glasgow, Hutchesontown–Gorbals
Thames & Hudson: Gerry Badger, Another Country: British Documentary Photography Since 1945
Book record: Jürgen Schadeberg, Great Britain 1964–1984, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2011, ISBN 978-3-89812-853-7
Originally published 24 May 2020.
