He eventually took a job at a department store and happily discovered that it offered employees a 10 percent discount on its merchandise. That discount would play a key role in McClure’s life, for he used it to buy his first camera—a Kowa 35 mm. Twenty-four hours later, he had found his passion. “It was amazing to me to see how the image would appear slowly in a tray of chemicals,” he says. “I was blown away that someone could figure out how to make that happen.”
Nowadays, the 55-year-old, self-taught photographer has a booming career, with touring exhibitions, a collection of commercial clients and individual collectors, and pride in the art he produces. “Glen McClure is not only a photographer’s photographer, nuanced to technique and the specific qualities of color and monochrome,” says Robin Nicholson, associate director for exhibitions at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, “but [he is] also a photographer with immense popular appeal.”
McClure’s cavernous studio, located in downtown Norfolk’s 1907-vintage Fairfax Hotel building, is peppered with art and artifacts he’s produced and collected over the years. An antique camera collection takes up most of a china press. An Irish street sign on a wall bears both English (Monasteraden) and Gaelic (Mainistir Aodain) names, and photographs are everywhere—on the walls, on tables, leaning against columns; black and white, color; big and small; unframed and framed. The scene is one of ordered chaos.
According to McClure, it wasn’t until 1998 that his style gelled and he found his niche as a photographer. At the time, he had a loft studio overlooking a gritty section of Colonial Avenue, a bit beyond the thriving Ghent district. There, he observed a daily parade of people, framed by his studio windows—what he calls “a great mixing bowl of humanity.” Inspired, one November day he took his equipment and a crew of friends out on the street and made portraits of passersby, to celebrate the neighborhood.
The next day, McClure started putting together the show that would launch his career. Named “2100 Colonial Avenue,” for the studio’s address, the exhibition at The Contemporary Art Center of Virginia first showcased McClure’s gift for revealing a voice, a personality, even a past in a single portrait. And he made sure to include the back stories of his subjects in the exhibition catalog (written by Doug Pilley). John Marshall Majette, an addled World War II veteran living in a halfway house, was one of the subjects. In the catalog picture, Majette looks as if he could spit nails. “He is always well dressed and usually has a different hat every time he passes by,” reads the caption. Roman, a callow young man from Blacksburg, was also in the show, looking equal parts shy and solicitous as he accompanies his girlfriend to Norfolk for an audition with the Virginia Stage Company.
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