Oscar Marzaroli was born in Castiglione, La Spezia, Italy in 1933. He moved to Scotland with his family in 1935, at the age of two, settling in Garnethill, Glasgow. Marzaroli attended Glasgow School of Art and subsequently established himself as a documentary photographer, working exclusively in black and white, producing an extensive visual record of postwar urban Scotland.
Photographer and filmmaker Oscar Marzaroli was born in Castiglione, La Spezia, Italy in 1933. He moved to Glasgow with his family in 1935, where they settled in Garnethill, a culturally diverse district, where he grew up among the children of the tenements, alongside Hungarian, Italian, Irish, Polish and Lithuanian immigrants. Marzaroli attended Glasgow School of Art for a period, acquiring a formal grounding in visual arts. In 1955, he began working as a freelance photojournalist in Stockholm and London. He returned to Glasgow in 1959 and established the photographic studio, Studio 59. In the same year he married Anne Connelly, with whom he had three daughters: Marie Claire, Nicola and Lisa Jane.
Marzaroli photographed exclusively in black and white, producing a substantial body of work documenting postwar urban Scotland and its inhabitants. His documentary practice focused on the streets, communities, shipyards and steelworks of Glasgow, with particular attention to the experiences of children in the city’s working-class districts. His dual identity as both an Italian immigrant and a Glaswegian by upbringing informed his engagement with his subjects. Occupying a position that was at once both that of an insider and an outsider, he developed an approach that combined empathy with a measure of critical distance. His most significant artistic influence was the painter Joan Eardley (1921-1963), whose work he described as possessing ‘an immediate quality, a realism, and a kind of urgency. Here, in her paintings were the children of the tenements as I recall them from my own childhood in Garnethill' (Renton, 1986). Both artists shared what Dr Tom Normand (University of St Andrews) has characterised as a ‘non-judgemental reportage which nevertheless viewed its subject with respect and something approaching awe’ (Marzaroli, 2013, pp. 113-114). Marzaroli moved among his subjects as an equal, positioning himself as a participant, rather than a detached observer, and approached the city as, in his words, ‘a microcosm of what was happening in all the great cities of the world’ (Renton, 1986, online source).
Among Marzaroli’s best known images are The Castlemilk Lads (1963) and The Golden-Haired Lass, both portraying children in Glasgow’s streets set against a landscape of vanishing tenements and newly constructed tower blocks. Another photograph taken in 1963 shows boys in the Gorbals playing at dressing up in high-heeled shoes. Over several decades of significant urban change, Marzaroli recorded Glasgow’s transformation, documenting the demolition of the Gorbals tenements, workers’ protests such as the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ work-in of 1971, and the 1961 demonstration against Polaris nuclear weapons (Brown, 2020). In 1967 he co-founded Ogam Films with Mike Pavett and Allan and Martin Singleton. In the early 1970s the company was commissioned by the Highlands and Islands Development Board to produce around 70 short films exploring social and economic change across the Scottish Highlands and Islands.
From the early 1980s onward, Marzaroli’s work gained wider public and national recognition through exhibitions and publications. In 1983 he contributed photographs to Noise and Smoky Breath: An Illustrated Anthology of Glasgow Poems, 1900–83, published by the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow. This was followed in 1984 by his solo exhibition, One Man’s World: Photographs 1955–84 at the same venue. His work reached a broader popular audience in the 1980s when the band Deacon Blue used his photographs for their record sleeves, including the cover of their debut album, Raintown (1987), which featured a panoramic view of Glasgow’s West End with the Finnieston Crane.
Oscar Marzaroli died in Glasgow, Scotland on 26 August 1988, at the age of 55. In the UK public domain, his archive of over 50,000 photographs was donated to Glasgow Caledonian University by his family in August 2019, where it is held by the Archive Centre.
The Ben Uri Research Unit welcomes contributions from researchers or family members who might know more.
Michal Mel
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Oscar Marzaroli]
Publications related to [Oscar Marzaroli] in the Ben Uri Library