Glasgow City Chambers, photographed in 2012. Archival venue photograph. Photo: PerryPlanet / Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
A photography exhibition at Glasgow City Chambers is revisiting Nelson Mandela’s relationship with a city that awarded him its highest civic honour while he was imprisoned in South Africa.
Mandela in Glasgow, by photographer Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, runs from 1 to 30 October 2026. The exhibition forms part of the Season of Photography programme.
The photographs document Mandela’s visits in October 1993 and June 2002, bringing two moments from his relationship with Glasgow into the same civic setting.
An honour awarded during imprisonment
Glasgow conferred the Freedom of the City on Mandela in 1981, while he was imprisoned on Robben Island. He came to accept the honour in 1993, after his release and before becoming South Africa’s president.
That sequence gives the visit its historical weight. The city’s recognition preceded his presidency and belonged to the international public campaign against apartheid.
Sutton-Hibbert’s photographs preserve a record of that encounter. They allow a later audience to examine how a civic gesture made during imprisonment became a meeting between Mandela and the people of Glasgow.
Two visits, different contexts
The exhibition also covers his 2002 visit. The photographer’s account connects that trip with Mandela’s meeting with Abdelbaset al-Megrahi at Barlinnie prison and a subsequent press briefing in the City Chambers.
Seen together, the visits show how photographs can hold more than a moment of public celebration. They also document the setting and circumstances of a public figure’s later interventions.
A city looking back at its own role
Showing the images in the City Chambers returns the story to the place where civic recognition was expressed. It gives residents a chance to revisit Glasgow’s part in the history of international solidarity with South Africa.
The exhibition makes that relationship visible through a photographer’s record of who came, where they gathered and what the city chose to commemorate.
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Sources: Street Level Photoworks · Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert