Douglas Corrance took this picture in one of Glasgow’s few surviving tenement streets in Maryhill in the late 1970s. Corrance was at the time working as a photographer for the Scottish tourist board, but there was, then, not much interest in tourism to Glasgow. Before the Garden festival in 1988 and the city of culture in 1990 transformed the image of the city, its stubborn associations were with deprivation and slum clearances – captured in Bert Hardy’s indelible postwar black-and-whites of street urchins in the Gorbals.

A new book of Corrance’s pictures from the 1970s and 1980s doesn’t ignore the poverty of parts of the city, but focuses, as here, on its life-loving character. Corrance, who grew up outside Inverness, had worked for a couple of years as a photographer in Sydney, Australia in the 1960s and tried to bring some of that light and colour home. “I hate snotty-nosed pictures of street kids,” he says. “That wasn’t the reality. Those tenement streets had a bad name, but as buildings, the Glasgow tenement was one of the finest designs ever made for city living. And they just pulled most of them down. Up until six years ago I lived in one, and it was great.”

Corrance is 73 now. Some of his portraits were recently acquired, as gifts, by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, though he says he became a photographer by accident almost, having fallen, at 15, into a job at a local newspaper in Inverness. His first assignments were to cycle out to some far-flung football match, hope that there was a goal in the first half he could photograph, and then cycle back through gales to print it up and catch the first edition. “After that,” he says, “cities were always wonderful places to me.” He has been using lockdown to go through some of the hundreds of thousands of transparencies he accumulated, but still, he says: “I never walk out even to the post office without taking my camera.”

Glasgow 1970s-1980s by Douglas Corrance is published by Cafe Royal books