Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Alan Dimmick.

Alan Dimmick was born in Glasgow in 1961. He 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. He went on to study photography at Glasgow College of Building and Printing from 1979–82 and was a founding member of Glasgow Photography Group, exhibiting at their inaugural exhibition in Hillhead Library in 1988. Early works were purchased by The People’s Palace, Glasgow and Scottish Arts Council in the 1980s and he exhibited in group shows at Collins Gallery, Glasgow the Pier Art Centre, Orkney and Inverness Museum & Art Gallery, among others. His work was part of the Contemporary Camera exhibition that toured Scotland in 1983.

Since the mid 1990s Dimmick has documented the lively contemporary art and music scene of his home city, Glasgow, capturing many of the events that have shaped a significant period in Scottish culture. In recent years, his images have been included in various publications and exhibitions of his work have been held at Street Level Photoworks and the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow and Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh. He showed 25 works at SWG3 in 2019 and at Stirling University in The Pathfoot Building in 2020. In 2012, Glasgow Museums acquired a number of Dimmick’s photographs to add to their collection of contemporary Scottish Art. The book Alan Dimmick Photographs 1977-2017 was published by Stills in 2018.

www.alandimmick.com

@alandimmick (Instagram)