T. & R. Annan & Sons

The Annan family firm of photographers was founded by Thomas Annan (1829–87). He was born in Fife to a farming and flax-spinning family, and after an apprenticeship as a lithographic writer, he took up employment in 1849 with Joseph Swan, owner of a lithographic printworks in Glasgow. He left in 1855 to establish a calotype studio at 86 Woodlands Road. Two years later, he set up in business on his own account at 116 Sauchiehall Street. By 1859, he was based at 200 Hope Street with a printworks in the town of Hamilton, E of Glasgow. 1

Annan's early career involved creating carte-de-visite portraits, photographing mansions and country houses, and producing scenic and stereoscopic views, but he also became known for his artistic portraits and landscapes. During the 1860s, he began to specialise in creating photographic reproductions of paintings, the skill for which he would be most celebrated during his lifetime. His first notable commission in this area was in 1862 for the Glasgow Art Union. The next came in 1865, from David Octavius Hill, when Annan photographed his enormous painting of the founding of the Free Church, which had itself been created with the aid of photographic portraits. Hill, in partnership with the engineer Robert Adamson, had founded Scotland's first photographic studio in 1843 on Calton Hill in Edinburgh. Annan produced thousands of prints of the painting using the new permanent carbon process developed by his mentor Joseph Swan, for which he purchased the patent rights for Scotland a year later. 2 On Hill's death in 1870, Thomas inherited many early calotype negatives from the studio, from which he made and exhibited carbon prints. 3

In 1868, Annan undertook what is now his most famous work. He was commissioned by the Glasgow City Improvement Trust to document the slum dwellings and wynds of Glasgow's East End marked for demolition. He used the most sensitive technique available, the wet collodion process, to cope with the lack of light in the narrow streets. It was an inconvenient process and photographs required immediate development and fixing, necessitating the use of a portable darkroom. Thus, three years were required to take 35 photographs. Two editions of The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow were published in Annan's lifetime, in 1872 and 1877. 4

Thomas Annan's brother Robert joined the firm in 1869 to assist with administration, and in 1873, the studio moved to 153 Sauchiehall Street, where it also served as an art gallery. During the 1880s, the firm established an autotype works in Lenzie, becoming one of the three largest producers of carbon tissue in Britain, and also an engraving works in South Lambeth, London. 5 In 1881, the Annan firm employed eight men, seventeen women and four boys. 6

In 1887, at the age of 57, Thomas committed suicide during what his death certificate described as 'a period of mental aberration'. 7 A year later, his sons, John (1863–1947) and James Craig (1864–1946), were listed as part of the family business, although both had been learning the trade for some years. John specialised in architectural photography, and is thought to have been responsible for the firm's engineering photographs. James had set up a photo-engraving business with Donald Swan in London in 1885, but upon his father's death returned to Glasgow to become a partner in the family business. 8

Like his father, James created new prints from Adamson and Hill's original calotypes, this time employing the new technique of photogravure which he had learned alongside his father from its inventor Karl Klíc in Vienna, and thus creating new interest in the work of the pioneers of early photography. He printed etchings and engravings by Scottish artist Muirhead Bone among others, and photographed the leading figures in the Glasgow Style movement, many of whom were his close friends. He took the well-known photograph of Mackintosh in his floppy bow tie. The Annans took numerous photographs of Glasgow streets and buildings; were official photographers to the Glasgow International Exhibitions of 1888, 1901, and 1911; and in 1889, were awarded a Royal Warrant from Queen Victoria as 'Photographers and Photographic Engravers to her Majesty in Glasgow'. 9

James began to do more personal work from around 1890. He was one of the first to use a hand-held camera, but although his work captured spontaneous movement, he would manipulate the plates before printing, achieving very different prints from the same plate. 10

He travelled in Europe with Scottish artist David Young Cameron, an etcher, and their joint exhibition in 1892, where some works portrayed the same subject, invited comparisons between the two media. Annan later said that 'It is when I have associated with artists that I have made my most successful pictures.' 11 In the early 1890s, he was admitted to Glasgow Art Club as a 'photographic artist' and to the Linked Ring Brotherhood, a society formed to promote photography as fine art. 12

From the mid-1890s, James became an influential, international figure with exhibitions and one-man shows across Europe and the USA, and his photography and writing was widely reproduced in journals. It was through his correspondence with James from 1895 onwards that the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz became interested in the early Scottish pioneers of photography, introducing them to the American public and photographers worldwide via his journal Camera Work. 13

James convened the photographic committee for the 1901 Glasgow International Exhibition, and two years later, buoyed by the financial success of the Exhibition, the firm commissioned Honeyman, Keppie & Mackintosh to design new premises at 518 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow. 14 The gallery side of the Annan firm gradually moved from photographing paintings to dealing in them. In 2006 Douglas Annan, the fifth generation of the family, left the business to concentrate on the photographic archive, and the Annan Gallery in 164 Woodlands Road now bears no family connection. 15