North East photographs captured for Tate exhibition
Life in the North East as recorded by three acclaimed photographers features in a major new London exhibition. Tony Henderson reports.
Three celebrated photographers who graphically captured life in the North East are part of a new exhibition at London’s Tate Britain.
The 80s: Photographing Britain, runs until May 5 next year and focuses on a time of social and political upheaval, the Thatcher years, deindustrialisation, deprivation, community life, Orgreave and the miners’ strike, Greenham Common; the Toxteth riots and the Troubles; Poll Tax, dole queues and the Aids crisis.
The work in the North East of Chris Killip, Tish Murtha and Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen features in the exhibition, which the Tate describes as a display of “powerful images that gave voice and visibility to underrepresented groups in society and which considers the decade as a pivotal moment for the medium of photography.
“The exhibitions explores how photographers used the camera to respond to the seismic social, political, and economic shifts around them.”
Chris Killip, who won widespread acclaim for his powerful black and white depictions of industrial landscapes and the people who inhabited them, worked in the region for 15 years from the mid-70s.
After arriving in the North East he lived in a flat in Bill Quay in Gateshead, and his work included documenting the life of sea coal gatherers in Lynemouth in Northumberland and the last years of shipbuilding.
He was a founder member of the Side Gallery in Newcastle,
His book The Last Ships pictures a working class community that lived and worked in the shadow of the Wallsend and South Shields shipyards. “I didn’t think it at the time, but I suppose I was photographing history,” he said.
Between 1991 and 2017, he was Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. He died in 2020 aged 74.
Tish Murtha was born in South Shields and grew up in Elswick in Newcastle, where life – and especially unemployment and its consequences - was a subject for her work.
Last year a documentary film, Tish was shown in cinemas nationally and on BBC Four. It is still available to view on BBC iPlayer.
Her images highlight the social disadvantage faced by people living in marginalised communities while also focusing on their efforts to survive challenging times.
In 2023, Tish Murtha House in Elswick was opened, offering apartments for older people around the same time as three exhibitions showcased her photography.
She died the day before her 57th birthday in 2013.
From 1969 Finnish photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen lived in Byker in Newcastle, at a time when the rows of terraced houses in the tight-knit community were being demolished and the Byker Wall estate was being built.
For around a decade she photographed and interviewed the residents of the area, resulting in her book Byker.
In 1980 she became the first photographer since the Cultural Revolution to have her work exhibited by the British Council in China.
Other projects included recording the world of the then hugely popular juvenile jazz bands, a study of girls attending dance schools in North Shields and three years of photographing the beach between Seaham and Hartlepool, which resulted in the series Coal Coast.
The work of these three North East-based photographer sits among others in the Tate exhibition which examines how photography collectives and publications highlighted these often-unseen stories, giving voice and visibility to underrepresented groups in society, including the Black arts movement, queer experience and representation of women in photography.
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