Blackpool has many faces as anyone who has visited there will discover.
On the beach it can be all ice-cream and sandcastles but a stone’s throw away in the bars and clubs a different world is revealed.
This is not a place for the faint hearted. I can recall being worse for wear myself in a low calibre club back in the nineties with bottles flying and one sloshed woman being carried around the dance floor with her legs wrapped around her male partner.
Stags, Hens & Bunnies A Blackpool Story is a photographic series, book and exhibition by Dougie Wallace that allows us into the revelry associated with getting hitched and these days even divorced. Stag and hen parties are often raucous affairs but in Blackpool they are elevated into a new form of wanton abandon.
Wallace himself was born in Glasgow to working class parents and goes under the moniker Glasweegee. He has his own unique style of frank street-wise photography that refuses though to be cold and patronising – we get to see the bawdy side of Blackpool in all its unrepressed glory.
Like a proper ‘Weedgie’ *, Dougie Wallace doesn’t patronise but sees humanity and pathos in the carnage that is Blackpool. – Irvine Welsh
Dougie Wallace has captured Blackpool in all its profligate glory. – Alan McGee
The book ‘Stags, Hens & Bunnies – A Blackpool Story’” is published by Dewi Lewis Media and is out now – www.dewilewis.com. The exhibition runs 25th July to 3rd August at Hoxton Gallery, 9 Kingsland Road, London E2 8AA – www.hoxtongallery.com
