One of Colin Templeton’s most recognized images is of a dog in snowy Glasgow. Taken in 2019, it has become a metaphor for his way of working, symbolizing his relentless wanderings through the streets of Glasgow in search of the essence of the city – an aspect that for him often lies in the overlooked and the everyday, the substitute and the mundane.
“The reason that Glasgow features in my work is simply that it's where I live,” he says, as he walks through Glasgow’s Cowcaddens area on which a black telephone box stands next to rusty bicycles and an abandoned traffic cone. “I know the place like the back of my hand, which helps.”
The Scottish photographer’s journey started when he was 11 years old when he received a Kodak pocket A-1 camera from his parents. “It took 110 cartridge film, and the image quality was pretty terrible, but I was immediately hooked on photography,” he said.
“I've worked as a press photographer for the past nearly 30 years. When you do that job, you have to just get out there and get the best picture you can, especially if it's news. The situation is often against you, as are any other photographers. With features, you have a bit more creativity.”
According to the photographer, his work has been influenced by William Eggleston, Josef Koudelka, Vivian Maier, Stephen Shore and Sam Abell.
Templeton reveals the world as constantly unpredictable, often incomplete; an everyday confusion of areas that most people do not pay attention to until he places it in front of our eyes.
The emphasis here is on surfaces and angles: grids, patterns, shadows and textures, all evoking the grain of the city as well as its energy and gritty character. “I generally always have a camera with me. If I get a day to myself, I like to wander into the city center, and see what catches my eye on that journey,” he says. “Some days I'll get nothing at all, other days I might get lucky. It's a bit like fishing. You won't get anything if you don't get out there.”
Captured mostly in Glasgow’s city center, Templeton’s street photos can be likened to a visual form of poetry that prompts the viewer. An unknown woman with a polka dot umbrella, encased with a plastic bag, is facing wind and rain.
As with the black and white work, there are recurring themes: misty weather, traffic lights, the brash shopfronts and signage on mornings in Glasgow and a handful of snatched portraits of its people. Templeton still prefers to fade into the background with his camera, but when he does get noticed, the responses from subjects tend to be friendly.
“I used to photograph people on the streets a lot more than I do now. People are more suspicious these days,” he says. “If someone asks you to delete a picture – unless you think it's an absolute belter – it's best just to do it. But in all my years, that's only ever happened to me once.”
Present Glasgow is a distant echo of the politically radical city that first fired the young Templeton’s imagination in the late 1980s. Nonetheless, it still wields a grip on his imagination. He shoots it, and he responds in a poetic manner, because “everyday things disappear, never to return.” That melancholy he sensed in Glasgow is all too tangible in Templeton’s later work, and it seems to have infected him, too, profoundly altering his way of seeing even as he continued to photograph the city around him with a new urgency. This unswervingly illuminating retrospective makes a charming sense of a boisterous life and the torrent of photos it has produced.
