Alan Dimmick CAP Speaker

Lovely to see images of the people across cultural communities in Scotland over the last 5 decades. As with the Richard Demarco archive it is a valuable record of some of the great moments in recent Scottish cultural history. For me, both collections raise the spectre of administration. When I was little I enjoyed playing post offices. The thought of having a real stamp that you could mark a piece of paper with the date filled me with glee. How important!. I also enjoyed arranging my felt tip pens in order of their colours. I still enjoy ordering objects on a small scale. My collection of beautiful inks are ordered differently depending on how I wish to think about how to use them next. There are still fewer than 15 of them though. As soon as an sorting, ordering task is likely to take more than half an hour, you are likely to see me heading off into the garden with a trowel or a pair of secateurs with urgent business to attend to. I take my hat off to Alan Dimmick. He has done the work, he has raised the funding, he has ordered, catalogued and looked after his collection. The note to self that I shall be writing tonight is to ensure that I only keep a maximum of 15 works of art to sort out at any one time – and they had better be worth it.

ALAN DIMMICK @ DCA cinema 1

‘Alan Dimmick bought his first camera (a Russian Zenith) in 1977, the same year that he converted the toilets in his secondary school annex into a darkroom.  

Focusing on everyday life around him, his friends, and his family, he went on to photograph artists and musicians in Glasgow capturing many of the events that have shaped a significant period in Scottish culture.
His early works were purchased by The People’s Palace and Scottish Arts Council, and he exhibited in group shows at Collins Gallery, the Pier Art Centre, Orkney and Inverness Museum & Art Gallery.
He has since had solo exhibitions at The Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Street Level Photoworks, Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, and Glasgow Museums acquired a number of Dimmick’s photographs to add to their collection of contemporary Scottish Art.
In 2019 he was awarded funding by Creative Scotland to create an archive of his work.’