Oscar Marzaroli - Man with a Camera

# I am the day, and the sunshine

and the first of the new.

the full extent of Marzaroli's after he took his first photo,

has created such a vast and varied photographer

all the time.

And every time I met him he had a camera round his neck.

or was going to.

this big six foot man with this part of the whole being,

not big and showy,

he kept returning

until his death in 1988,

of the city

I think describing Oscar Marzaroli

in residence is completely apt.

that insider-outsider grasp. As someone who had an Italian

both inside and outside,

a documentary record of a city.

and this is how he worked.

my father's gone into an event,

for very long,

the event itself

watching, the crowd,

the whole spirit of it.

what their views are as such,

He doesn't have hundreds they're together.

of the Industrial Revolution.

created great wealth to a city of over a million

Even though,

if you like, and people and become one of the group,

And it - you know, he just caught them on the move.

that discretion -

to his photography.

and he was a little bit shy and widely read

but he quickly revealed to them that he was the one

wasn't taking any chances three children to ill health,

well at his Jesuit-run school,

and his older brother Louis

school of hard knocks,

that World War II

When Oscar was seven,

boxing gloves for Christmas.

I'm not saying they were tough guys learned to box a bit, you know,

sort of bitterness about that.

Oscar's battle with ill health just to carry on.

at Glasgow College of Printing.

Oscar contracted TB

His parents had retired to Italy where he spent a life-changing year.

three months between them.

gave Oscar time to recuperate

He also picked up his camera

taking pictures of staff for the first time,

He'd already had a wee brief taking photographs.

because then after that, really was the turning point

in a kind of when he started taking pictures,

spells in London and Stockholm,

stint as a fashion photographer.

He was an egalitarian, of Glasgow were calling him home.

the city was alive in 1959

You had the poems of Edwin Morgan,

A burgeoning folk scene, which were kind of similar.

and I think he said himself,

who worked from everyday life,

Cartier-Bresson

Joan Eardley died in 1963,

the same again,

to document the changes.

I live in a tenement

biggest slums

# By those mansion-dwelling and so we've been telt to move

to greenbelts, trees and floo'ers

and we daily tell them so

the building next tae oors. #

densely populated cities in Europe.

the problem,

the tenements and replace them

and out-of-town housing schemes.

had been destroyed.

to feel the shock of this change

of community spirit.

some of his best-loved photos.

asking them what they wanted to be that I remember very well,

they wanted to be demolishers.

got the contract

high flats in the Gorbals,

I think, to open the first one?

rise like a phoenix from the ashes.

in the ashes.

in the Gorbals

done in the Gorbals

was to a certain extent

and in the Western world.

to give a message.

record reality.

As it was.

There's a sense of vigour of ordinary people.

the kind of dilapidation

that you see.

look heroic.

to live in circumstances

just to survive.

was never there for him,

like the Gorbals,

this microcosm of people

for something better.

as a deprived place.

At Sandyfaulds Street,

to your street? That's right.

I stayed...

right facing the Star.

Mind the fish shop, the Star?

all my life, 92 year,

anything about them.

saying they're bad -

Good and bad everywhere.

I'll be carried in a box out of it.

We are strong and proud

We will sing out loud

and making friends... #

began taking photographs,

beyond recognition.

its third regeneration,

of Glasgow's sense of itself,

the photographers of today.

is documenting the area

at the Citizens Theatre.

the same streets that Oscar walked,

in the Gorbals photographing people,

was photographing in the Gorbals

children trying on shoes -

in the streets,

really see that at all any more.

now in the Gorbals

be met with some suspicion,

get so much of back then.

is quite sad really

that are growing up just now,

photographs of them

in the '60s, '70s,

when I was growing up.

phone photography,

to take pictures

street photographers like Oscar

out in the street.

playing in groups

want to sort of

he would be away from that.

maybe take a picture, go.

in that play,

they're unaware that he's there.

something.

and a pause and a click,

an indiscriminate sort of

and hundreds - until you get one.

# Oh, you cannae shove yer granny

aff a bus

# You can shove yer other granny aff a bus

and its industrial heritage, with all its tenements

was very dark and defined.

the Pinkston canal, in a couple of Oscar's pictures of

and in the distance the different of the four lads and the signal,

is that he wasn't interested in

the people he was photographing.

As a result, we have no idea who and move on.

She doesn't look lost or anything

but nowadays, if you got chalk

The "Golden Haired Lass" you'd get into trouble.

what had happened to these children you know, that impulse to find out

I basically made posters

We'd just come off the cross-country my brother."

and I was doing this... They had really lost touch when he took the photograph.

All of them, which we weren't part of.

And he said,

photographic achievements

In the early 1960s, he started

"a great idea to have a human in it "storks in the sky, and it would be

'But Glasgow's future is planned

representatives.

you were tied down to having to have

in it, which was a bit restrictive.

because he felt that he hadn't to was always with the stills camera

and it was, it was just him

out there that he wanted to record.

made it clear where his true passion the publisher Jenny Renton, Oscar

"With the stills camera hanging "how you might be affecting things.

some beautiful images from or stills, Oscar managed to create

There are echoes here aluminium smelter in Invergordon.

a large number of documentaries

and Islands Development Board.

his time on location wisely,

Slate, sea and sky.

slate, sea and sky

Ballachulish for the weekend

And it was a beautiful day, along Rannoch Moor.

And then he'd stop and get back

And he said, and I said, "Why are you stopping?"

the first to be published in more of Oscar's most recent book,

photos than printing them.

He was fairly modest about it

In 1984, a quarter of a century going in the Third Eye Centre.

a major retrospective leading publishers released

and really he shouldn't have ill for a couple of years,

But we all worked together,

We had a big launch at what out as soon as possible.

posthumously, but, um,

happen with him.

I wanted to keep his name alive.

Even now, even 25 years later,

in Scotland,

that he has,

understand his work.

We have about 50,000 negs there. not just people from the art world."

Oscar's photographs

THEY have become for his family.

Like I can see what kind of a man making jokes and laughing.