'Anger points me in a direction': Photographer Kirsty Mackay on capturing the cost of living crisis
The documentary photographer speaks about her latest exhibition, The Magic Money Tree
Kirsty Mackay, a documentary photographer who grew up in a working-class tenement block in Glasgow, has spent the past few years documenting the cost of living crisis—and the political choices that provoked it.
Her images resist the ‘poverty porn’ that has often characterized the UK media’s depictions of people struggling financially. The austerity era of the twenty-tens was defined by shows such as Benefits Street, On Benefits and Proud, and the Jeremy Kyle Show, which author Darren McGarvey has written represents ‘the poor, vulnerable and imbecilic as circus freaks for the sport of a crowing audience of working-class viewers who couldn’t see the joke was on them.’
Kirsty’s photography, instead, finds the dignity, humanity, resilience and joy in the lives of people thrown into poverty by political forces. I spoke to Kirsty about her approach to the craft of photography, how she thinks about knotty questions of class and power, and why anger can be a productive creative emotion. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Kirsty’s exhibition The Magic Money Tree builds on her previous work, The Fish That Never Swam, which documented excess mortality in Glasgow after the city was placed in ‘managed decline’ by the UK government. You can see The Magic Money Tree at the New Art Gallery Walsall until 28 July.
JB: You’ve spoken about seeing your work as ‘structural photography,’ shifting focus from an individual’s choices towards the outcomes of political policies. Can you elaborate on that idea?
KM: So what I enjoy doing the most is working one-to-one with these people, photographing people in their own house and recording their stories. I think something really special happens when you go into someone else’s house, and become the person more vulnerable, and it’s also a safe space for someone to tell their story. So that’s what I really enjoy. But then afterwards, that doesn’t seem quite enough for me. What I also really enjoy is trying to gather stories that I can then later connect to a political policy, or what’s happening politically, to reinforce these personal stories that I’m collecting.
That’s something that really comes through in your work. The Fish That Never Swam, your book about Glasgow and excess mortality, is interspersed with sociological writing. Is that how you see your role as a photographer—not just trying to capture something for the viewer, but to educate them as well and even spur them to action?
With The Fish That Never Swam, once I’d read the research—which really blew me away, it had a big impact on me finding out those answers—once I processed that and then started going out to take pictures, I was definitely able to see a role for myself and what I could do. That was very much: go out across the city, speak to individuals on-the-ground, in communities that are most affected, and connect it to the research. Because obviously, that academic research is done at a distance, and so there was a very clear pathway for me to work in. With The Magic Money Tree, I see it as a line. A line that starts with decisions made by politicians, and tracing that line back into individual people’s lives, into their bodies, into their health, into their mental health. I’m very much trying to make that line visible.
One of the things that surprised me about your work is the time you take to build relationships with your subjects. For instance, you thought it was really important to go back to your hometown of Glasgow for a full month for that project, taking time to really get to know people before taking their picture. Can you tell us more about that creative process and the importance of creating these bonds?
When I speak to people, I don’t necessarily go in with an agenda, with a need to turn things around quickly. When you go in gently and listen to people, there’s a kind of outpour. I don’t always have to ask a lot of questions. I think of it as a safe space, that I am creating a safe space for some people to tell their story. Quite often, there’s an outpouring of people’s stories. I’m also aware that it’s not going to be a safe space for everyone, but as a white, working-class woman, I’m definitely a safe space for lots of working- class voices.
So the creative process really varies. But a really good example is: when I started making work in South Shields, I didn’t have any contacts, I had nowhere to start. So I went to the food bank and I met a woman there called Marie. I said to her, ‘Who else should I speak to for this project?’ She put me in touch with a woman called Barbara, who’s a social navigator. She works for the council, she pairs people up with support they need. I shadowed Barbara for a day. I didn’t take any pictures, I just went along with her and whatever she was doing that day. She took me to the drop in centre in South Shields, and that’s where I met Leighanne. I didn’t take any photographs that day. We just had a chat. Then I asked if I could go to Leighanne’s house and take some pictures. As I was photographing Leanne, she started telling me her story. It was the most amazing experience—because I didn’t really ask any questions, but Leighanne’s story is very moving. She has children that are in the care system, so her story is very painful, but also she had just seen her children, because it was their birthday, so she was also full of joy. So right in front of me, Leighanne’s story just started to come out as I was taking her picture.
Then every time I went to South Shields I would get in touch with Leighanne. Sometimes I’d go and just have a cup of tea. There was one time I went up and her ex-partner had just passed away, so I popped around with some flowers, we had a cup of tea and just chatted. Just through the process of spending time and getting to know Leighanne, at the very end of last year as I was wrapping up the project, she told me that the reason she gave her youngest up for adoption was really because she’d left a relationship, and she had no money, and she didn’t have a house. And for me, that was the last piece of the story that I was trying to tell about Leighanne, that came out very slowly over the space of, you know, six to eight months. I think that’s the benefit of being able to spend a lot of time with people.
I want to talk about class. Journalism and photography certainly have a history of middle-class people going into working-class communities and then portraying people in a one-dimensional way. You’ve spoken before about how you were raised working-class and, through your career, you have kind of lived a middle-class life, which has led to complex class feelings. For Glasglow in particular, what was it like to return there after so much had changed for you?
I’ve always been going back to Glasgow, as my family are still there. So it wasn’t like I hadn’t been there for years and suddenly went back. But when I moved to London and I’d go back to visit Glasgow, I would feel differently. I didn’t feel like I fitted in so much anymore. I had this kind of in-between identity—I wasn’t a fully middle-class person and I was a bit too posh to fit in at home in some ways. It’s funny, because you see yourself a certain way, but then others perceive you in a different way. When people ask me about class, I say I’m from a working-class background, because I know that so many of my values come from growing up working-class.
How do you feel more broadly about those power dynamics that are inherent in photography?
I think that photography is really lacking because there’s so few working-class voices. Some stories are just not being covered. It leads to people being represented in a very superficial way.
I want to change track slightly and talk about politics. I’ve noticed that when you intersperse politics in your work—like with Glasgow, and how it was designated a city in ‘managed decline’ and starved of funding, or in The Magic Money Tree looking at the political choices that laid the foundations for the cost of living crisis—there seems to be a sense of political anger. I wonder about anger as an emotion, do you find this to be a productive creative emotion at times?
Yeah, I think anger is really healthy. If you work through anger and get to action, then it’s healthy anger. If you feel anger and you stay in anger, that’s not good for you. It doesn’t just stop there. I think the anger that I feel, it points me in a direction, it helps me to see what action I can take.
So it’s almost a clarifying force?
Yeah. And on the way through a project, that anger, that emotion, definitely transforms into action. When you publish a project or exhibit it—and I carry these projects for a long time on my back—to release them out into the world, there’s definitely a massive weight that’s lifted.
Speaking of things to be angry at, you have spoken about your frustration with ‘poverty porn’ and representations of poverty that seem to flatten people’s complexity and personhood. Your work seems to resist that. I’m thinking in particular of, you know, the joyful images, like the images of children cartwheeling and jumping in The Magic Money Tree. What are your thoughts on those ‘poverty porn’ representations and how you escape them?
I didn’t grow up in poverty, but there were definitely people around me who were growing up in poverty, so I know what that looks like. It’s really important that as well as the more serious images—and I tend to work with very serious subjects—it’s really important to make sure you add in and capture the joyous moments, and the beauty and the love and the care. Because all too often there’s only one kind of story that’s told, and that’s doing a disservice to communities.
The reason that I knew I wanted to work collaboratively is because I’ve been into communities before that I haven’t known. And I know that, even with me being conscious of all that, I’m still seeing it through one set of eyes. So with The Magic Money Tree, it was really important that communities were seen through lots of different eyes, not just mine.
Like giving people cameras [to take their own images] and so on.
Yeah.
There’s a recurring motif in your work that I’ve noticed, which is mortality and death—the big unknown at the end of it all—as well as the quest to find meaning and dignity in life. I know you’ve talked about witnessing firsthand two suicides when you were a child, and I think I interpret that, in some ways, that you’ve seen the depths of despair that poverty can bring people to. I wondered if you could talk about how you see this duality of life and death across your work?
I think that I just see, over and over again, the areas that I work in, that people’s lives are restricted. And so often people die young. If you’re born into a certain area, a disadvantaged area, what you get is so much less, in terms of how long you’re going to live. At one point, I really wanted to record that journey home from the hospital, that first journey a baby makes. Because the area they’re going to reflects so much, in terms of opportunities and even how long that baby will live. So that keeps cropping up in my work.
Yeah, and I’m reminded of that picture of Wee John [from The Fish That Never Swam], who is on the line between the football, and the borderline of two communities as well which have vastly different mortality rates, which is really striking.
I think maybe the reason for it is that, what we’re told quite often by politicians is, ‘Just get another job, just work more hours, it’s all down to the individual.’ When it’s really not. That’s what I’m trying to push against.🗨️
In other news…
The newsletter took a three-week break during the UK election campaign and its aftermath. But now we’re back to regular programming.
I’ll have a piece out in The Guardian soon on the human impact of the Conservatives’ two-child cap on universal credit. Scrapping the policy was left out of Labour’s King’s Speech today.