When the Tay Road Bridge, one of the longest bridges in Europe, was opened by the Queen Mother on 18 August 1966, Joseph McKenzie and his camera were there.
The McManus art gallery and museum in Dundee, which holds hundreds of McKenzie’s photographs, is marking the 50th anniversary this year by releasing a collection of his images of the 2,250-metre bridge and the men who built it.
McKenzie was given access to all areas throughout the four-year project by the designer William Fairhurst. His photographs formed part of his exhibition in the late 1960s titled Dundee: City in Transition.
He had moved from his native London to Scotland to work as a photographer and teacher, and recalled once that he had repeatedly been told: “Nobody loves Dundee.” “Maybe this was the right moment to demonstrate something more,” he said.
McKenzie, who died last year, taught a generation of young Scottish photographers at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art. He worked entirely in black and white, and was fascinated by Scotland’s post-industrial heritage and the decaying urban fabric of many cities.
“When I came to Dundee to teach photography in 1964 as a foreigner-incomer, I was at once poleaxed by the combination of wonderful light and an eroding urban texture of an unsophisticated tradition, which photography handles so well,” he said.
The most famous Tay bridge was the Victorian rail bridge that fell into the river along with a train crossing it in 1879, a disaster immortalised in magnificently bad verse by William Magonagall.
The £6m road bridge, now free to cross but originally a toll road charging half a crown, rises gradually from the Dundee side to the Fife bank. Some years ago a local radio competition to find a slogan for the bridge was abandoned when the most popular suggestion was: “It’s all downhill to Dundee.”
