Someone online posted the link to a 2016 article from Scotland’s Daily Record, ‘Photographer reveals the gritty pictures of poverty stricken Glasgow too shocking to publish in 1980’.

The article has a selection of photographs from a Frenchman, Raymond Depardon, who was accustomed to visiting war zones. In 1977, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his photographs of Chad.

The thing that struck me was how feminine the girls, the lady with a baby carriage and the older woman looked. By 1980 in the United States, most girls and women were firmly ensconced in trousers. Seeing skirts and dresses shows that, for an American, time did not march on back then as much as it did in the US. Now that much of Western Europe has caught every American trend going, time moves much more quickly on this side of the Atlantic, unfortunately.

Even Glaswegian graffiti in 1980 was pretty basic. Here, again, American taggers had already moved on to elaborate, gang-identified designs, some of which were illegible to the uninitiated.

That year, The Sunday Times commissioned Depardon to chronicle Glasgow in pictures. The paper’s editors refused to publish the photographs. They were too realistic. I’m not sure what they expected to see. After all, it was Glasgow. When I went to Scotland in the Spring of 1978, even then people warned my classmate and me to go to Edinburgh instead, which we did. Every Briton who is 60+ now knew that Glasgow was rough back then.

In 2016, the Barbican Gallery in London put on a retrospective of Raymond Depardon’s photographs, which were also included in his book published that year, Glasgow.

Raymond, who was 73 in 2016, spoke to the Daily Record. Excerpts from the article follow, emphases mine:

The images include three drunks boozing beside a fire, children playing in the street and a poignant shot of a boy crying outside a shop.

… he will never forget the time he spent in a city that shocked and delighted him in equal measure.

He said: “I came to Glasgow twice, once in the autumn of 1980 and once in the spring. I was shocked by the poverty. I wasn’t expecting to find a population in the north of Europe that was so deprived.

“There was also a civil war going on but, unlike in Beirut, there were no other photographers. I was alone on the streets and had no one to talk to about what I had seen. I felt very much like a fish out of water.

“I had spent the last decade covering civil wars and oriental rebellions. On my arrival, I was surprised by the people, the architecture and above all the light. Everything seemed very exotic.

“I worked in Glasgow like I did on the streets of Beirut, without prejudice and despite being shocked by the destitution, I loved every minute. No matter where I went, the people were welcoming and never seemed sad with their lot.”

The photojournalist, who took the official portrait of French president Francois Hollande in 2012, said he would not have got such superb shots without the help of some friendly Glasgow kids.

Although the language barrier was there, Depardon said that the children took him to their play areas — the streets of the city:

“They didn’t understand me but would take me by the hand and trail me around their landmarks. It’s thanks to them that I was able to capture the incredible images.

“Maybe at 38, I was like them, still a child. They didn’t pay me any attention. I was just part of their game.

“My favourite photo is of a little boy who is crying in front of a shutter. It made me think of a Dickens novel.”

He said: “I was sad that my Glasgow photos were never published back in the 80s. I am really proud to be exhibited at the Barbican and I had great pleasure in telling my friends there to choose whichever photos they liked.

“I hope the photos which I happily took 36 years ago will still bring pleasure to those who see them today.”

The acclaimed British author William Boyd, who studied in Glasgow in the 1970s, wrote the foreward to Depardon’s book on the city:

He writes: “When you left the centre of town or the area where the university was, it was very easy to find yourself in a neighbourhood of abject urban poverty and squalor.

“It wasn’t just the manifest decrepitude of the housing or the ­diminished quality of the goods in the shops – you saw deprivation and ­desperation etched in the faces of the young and the old.

“As it happens I had been looking at Depardon’s photographs before I returned to Glasgow two weeks ago. The city is largely transformed today from the one that Depardon photographed in the early 1980s.

“The abandoned wharves, shipyards and warehouses of the riverside – Glasgow’s imperial industrial heartland and the source of its wealth – are now landscaped parks and yet, you can turn a corner and this new 21st century city disappears and in its place are the wide rainwashed streets of an older Glasgow.”

I wonder what Boyd would make of Glasgow in 2024, with so many of the big stores in Sauciehall Street and surrounds boarded up. The same, sadly, is true of Edinburgh — and, even sadder, London’s Oxford Street.

I realise that a number of department store chains have gone out of business over the past several years but wonder what that says about us as a society that our high streets are so deserted. Depardon’s photographs from 44 years ago look innocent by comparison.