To celebrate LS Lowry’s famous painting ‘Going to the Match’ being on display to the public here at Williamson Museum and Art Gallery, photographer Colin McPherson will be staging a talk contrasting visual representations of football supporters now and in the past.
McPherson will draw on his own photography featured in ‘At The Match’, a newly-published compendium of images of contemporary football culture from the photography archive of When Saturday Comes magazine, to discuss how the rituals and routines of going to the match have changed through the generations.
‘At The Match’ showcases the work of Wirral-based McPherson and his colleagues Simon Gill and Paul Thompson have made over the last 20 years covering matches across the United Kingdom and Ireland at all levels from international to grassroots football. Copies of the book will be available for purchase on the night.
At the event, McPherson will also present a new piece of work inspired by Lowry’s masterpiece. Titled ‘Going to the Match (after Lowry), 2024’ it is a reimagining of the painting, taken this year at Bolton Wanderers’ Toughsheet Community Stadium (the original was a representation of the club’s former Burnden Park home).
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Colin McPherson is a photographer, filmmaker and writer whose work has appeared in When Saturday Comes since the magazine’s launch in 1986. Over the last 35 years, his photography has been published and exhibited internationally and he worked for 20 years on assignments and commissions for The Independent from 1995-2016. He is a member of the Merseyside-based SixBySix photography collective and contributes regularly to Nutmeg, the Scottish football periodical and The Blizzard.