The Fish That Never Swam

Book Edition - £45
Edition of 500.
288 pages, soft cover 245 x 320 mm.
104 photographs, text written by Kirsty Mackay, abridged research paper ‘History Politics and Vulnerability’ from the Glasgow Centre for Population Health.

Print Edition - £100
Book + 1 x Giclee print on 310gsm Expressions cotton rag paper. 10 x 8 inches.

Collectors Edition - £1,200
Book + 10 x Giclee prints on 310gsm Expressions cotton rag paper presented in a Portfolio box. 20 x 16 inches.
Collectors Edition Shipping fees to be confirmed after purchase.

Publishing date October 2021.
Orders shipped October 2021.

In Glasgow people’s lives are cut short: male life expectancy in Possil is 66, in Penilee three young people took their own lives within the space of one week in June 2020, suicide in Glasgow is 30% higher than English cities, male life expectancy is 7 years short of the UK average and women’s is 4 years less. This is not isolated to areas of deprivation – Glaswegians across all social classes experience a 15% reduction in life expectancy.

The causes of Glasgow’s excess mortality lie in government policy - not with the individual and their lifestyle choices. Local, regional and central government policies created an environment where: segregation, alienation, mass unemployment, the generational trauma that followed, poverty and deprivation constitute a public health issue. During the 1970s and 80’s Glasgow was in a ‘managed decline’. Unbeknown at the time, the city was starved of funding from Westminster.

Kirsty Mackay spent 4 years traveling across the city researching, interviewing and photographing. This work links Mackay’s own experience growing up in the city, the loss of her father and three of her male friends, the diverse experiences of the people she photographed together with the latest research from the Glasgow Centre for Population Health. Connecting the latest academic research with the lived experience to present an in-depth study into the health inequalities and life expectancy gap in her home city.

‘It is to the bodies of Glasgow’s young, therefore that Mackay looks for traces and translations of policies (and politics) actioned decades before they were born. The white body of a toddler, held skin to skin with its mother, a young girl or a teenager in a black hoodie, nothing marks them out, yet they are subject as Mackay is (as am I) to a form of social predestination shaped in council chambers and think tanks, but writ in us in our bones and the cells that built them, and which build our children in turn.’
Dr Katherine Parhar, writer, curator and educator.

Supported by the Rebecca Vassie Trust.