The exhibition Strange and Familiar (Barbican London 2016 / Manchester City Art Gallery 2017) shows Britain as seen by foreign photographers. It includes French photographer Raymond Depardon, who photographed in Glasgow in 1980. The show conspicuously omits Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, the Finnish photographer who photographed in Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1970s. Tate Modern makes up for this with a room devoted to her work in the Living Cities permanent display.

Both photographers focused on a specific city neighbourhood. Konttinen in Byker, east Newcastle; Depardon in Govan, south west Glasgow and the Gorbals in south east Glasgow.

The photos below show the massive side wall of Govan Shipbuilders in Taransay Street (though Depardon does not identify it), and the cobbled road surface at the ends of terraces in Janet Street, Byker.

Left: Raymond Depardon Glasgow 1980     Right: Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Girl on a Spacehopper, Janet Street backlane

Both areas have a lot in common – inner city industrial districts two miles out of the city centre, both on the river bank, formed of high density, terraced worker housing, serving riverside industry and shipyards. The photographs feature the muscular housing and street form distinctive to each – in Byker: Tyneside flats in two-storey terraces, in Govan: four storey tenement blocks. In these two photographs we see the backs of housing terraces.

Left: Raymond Depardon Glasgow 1980      Right: Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Beresford Road / Avondale Road backlane

Both areas were in the process of dramatic change, with the decline of river-oriented industry, the condemnation and redevelopment of housing in modernist estates. This change is evident in both sets of photos.

Both photographers use a similar reportage approach to photography; both show streets populated by children and older people, run-down businesses, unmaintained streets.

Left: Raymond Depardon Glasgow 1980      Right: Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen St Peters Road

But there is a considerable difference in sympathy. Konttinen lived in Byker for a few years and knew the people as neighbours. The photographs are located by street names. Depardon came from France for the Sunday Times and looked for the grimmest part of the city which he photographed like a war reporter, The view is detached, there is no sense of community, all the photographs are titled ‘Glasgow’ not ‘Govan’. They seem to show people alienated by their environment, whereas Konttinen shows families and individuals, integral to the place, with humour and empathy. She gained the trust of people and photographed inside homes, hairdressers, clubs, while revealing the hardship, stress and outdated facilities.

Left: Raymond Depardon Glasgow 1980.      Right: Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Mending the pavement

Both essays show how good photography is in recording fragments of ‘the present’ in its revealing detail. The photographs are of living places, with signs of age, poor condition and poverty. But both, even in the affection of Konttinen’s Byker, also show how inadequate photography is in narrating urban change. In their static reality, there are hoardings and demolition, signs of the economic shifts taking place, but no sense of the complex machinations of urban change that affected both areas, the politics, the decanting and re-housing, the urban roads taking the economic focus away from the river and changing the social geography of the city.

Left: Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Ragman’s horse and cart     Right: Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen St Peters Road

In retrospect, we know this. But to visit the places now, we not only see the developments that transformed these neighbourhoods, but also the subsequent stages of regeneration; the urban and community responses to and adaptation of the modernist housing solutions that followed these photographs. And incidentally, that shipyard wall and tenement block on Taransay Street in Govan is still there, conserved and beautifully enhanced.