When old age shall this generation waste,Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woeThan ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is allYe know on earth, and all ye need to know. Ode on a Grecian Urn, John Keats

TISH MURTHA

The photographs of Tish Murtha were always going to be part of True/Grit. Her images deserve to be far better known. One of a number of great documentary photographers who gathered around Side Gallery and the Amber collective in the late 1970s and the 1980s, her work is filled with argument, anger, self-awareness and humour. The sense of its complexity has grown each time the gallery has revisited it over the years. Plans for True/Grit were already advanced when she died in April. Side decided to celebrate her extraordinary talent by devoting the downstairs space to work from the three of her exhibitions represented in its collection.

Tish became a photographer as a teenager living in Elswick. She studied documentary at Newport in Wales and came back to Newcastle. Side commissioned her to document the campaign to save the Vickers Scotswood Works, which closed in 1979. Juvenile Jazz Bands, which was shown at Side Gallery that same year, upset some, particularly for its documentation of young people cast out of from the jazz band world for bad behaviour, but still playing the routines. Tish worked on Youth Unemployment (1981) while herself employed at the Side Gallery on a job scheme for the unemployed. She photographed members of her own family and their friends on the streets of Elswick. The rubble and the buildings being demolished in some of the images are the Noble Street flats, which had replaced streets documented by Jimmy Forsyth only twenty years earlier.

As part of True/Grit, this small celebration is a tribute to a photographer and a friend of Side who is deeply missed.

GALLERYTRUE / GRIT

A CELEBRATION OF NORTHERN REALISM

Photographs from the Side collection01/06/13 - 03/08/13

Gritty (gri-ti), a. 1598 [f. GRIT sb. + -y.] 1. Of the nature of or resembling grit; containing, consisting of, or full of grit; sandy. 2. Full of or containing minute hard particles; also fig. of literary style, with allusion to the quality of gritty bread 1882. 3. U.S. colloq. Having grit... Firmness or solidity of character; indomitable pluck or spirit; stamina 1825. Oxford English Dictionary

GRIT AND BEAUTY

The idea for this exhibition originated in a slide show prepared for a debate on the North East and culture at Newcastle’s Northern Stage. It presented a selection from documentary exhibitions by various photographers associated with the Amber collective and Side Gallery over more than 40 years. A writer for the Guardian, sitting on the other side of the debate, asked: ‘Why is it always raining? Why does the sun never shine? Why do they not photograph the beauty of the North East?’ In one sense, the answers were easy: ‘It isn’t raining in most images. The sun does shine. They celebrate beauty in working class and marginalised people’s everyday lives, landscapes and struggles. They are, themselves, beautiful.’ And the journalist had the grace to accept that this was true. But the simplicity of the answers masked the complexity of the questions around how both the North and working class/marginalised experience are represented.

Amber filmmakers take pains to find the most beautiful locations, only to have the work reduced by some critic as ‘another piece of northern gritty realism.’ Most of the photographers in this exhibition have had similar reactions. The term is usually used as a way of dismissing the work – so that no one should have to go to the trouble of really looking at the work. This exhibition is an invitation to explore the complexity of the individual images and the richness of a documentary tradition in this region that has captured its experiences of extraordinary change with love, with a commitment to exploring the difficulties of truthfulness and with great artistry. The photographs are, each, from bodies of work exploring their chosen territories with even greater levels of captured ambiguity.

The exhibitions can be deeply personal. They often grow from a rich understanding of responsibility to the documented. But they are also often engaged in an argument with a sense of the country’s metropolitan centre. In different ways this is something that has happened throughout the history of photography: the North as the ‘other’; an honesty contrasted with sophistication and lies. It found a new intensity, however, in the response to the recession of the 1970s. This only increased as the effects of a policy of deindustrialisation were documented. Capturing the on-going impacts of an economic vision that has been one of the legacies of the Thatcher era, northern documentary has forefronted the realities of what is often glibly presented as necessary cost.

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True/Grit is part of the Festival of the North East

EXHIBITION NOTES

ENTRANCE

JUNGLE PORTRAITS Isabella Jedrzejczyk, 1981Amber’s filmmakers & photographers frequented The Jungle on North Shields Fish Quay in the 1970s and early 1980s. It had a colourful reputation, locals mixing with visiting seamen. Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen also developed a set of portraits.

DOWNSTAIRS GALLERY

SAVE SCOTSWOOD WORKS Tish Murtha, 1979Amber’s documentation of the Save Scotswood Works campaign became part of its film Tyne Lives (1980). Tish Murtha documented the campaign in parallel.

JUVENILE JAZZ BANDS Tish Murtha, 1979Juvenile jazz bands were hugely popular in the North East in the 1970s/80s. Tish caused controversy with her focus as much on those excluded as those in the uniforms.

YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT Tish Murtha, 1981Tish was employed at Side Gallery on a Manpower Services Commission job creation scheme when she developed this extraordinary body of work, photographing members of her family and their friends on the streets of Elswick.

UPSTAIRS GALLERY

SURVIVAL PROGRAMMES: IN BRITAIN’S INNER CITIES Exit Photography Group, 1982Exit (Paul Trevor, Chris Steele-Perkins, Nick Battye) developed Survival Programmes between 1974 and 1979, documenting experience in London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Newcastle, Middlesbrough, Glasgow and Belfast. The photographs from the North East were by Chris Steele-Perkins. Side Gallery brought New York printer Sid Kaplan over to print the work for the exhibition.

TYNESIDE Ian Berry, 1978 The box in the Side Collection says Tyneside, but other North East images are included. The work, which may have been shown as part of Northern View in 1978, is included in Berry’s book The English, published in that year.

RIVER PROJECT Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Graham Smith, 1974This early Amber touring project also included work by Amber Films, photographer and sculptor Laurie Wheatley, writers Tom Pickard and Rodney Pybus and German artist Peter Engel. The difficulty in finding a venue for it in Newcastle was part of the logic that led to Amber opening Side Gallery in 1977.

SEACOAL Chris Killip, 1984Photographer Mik Critchlow’s cousin Trevor was a leading figure among the Lynemouth seacoalers. That Side had given Mik a commission opened access to a community generally suspicious of photographers who might be from the DHSS. Amber bought a caravan on the site, which was used by the filmmakers at weekends and by Chris Killip during the week. The film was released in 1985.

THE HOPPINGS Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, 1976The largest fairground gathering in Europe, which was held on Newcastle’s Town Moor until last year, was the subject of an exhibition in 1976, before Side Gallery opened. The images here are from 1971 and from a later documentation in 1980.

STEP BY STEP Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, 1987Tyneside dancing schools figured in montages Sirkka developed for 1974’s River Project. The documentation continued in Amber’s photography film Keeping Time (1983) and continued through to the exhibition and book of Step by Step in 1987. The photograph used here was exploring the wider context.

SHIPBUILDING ON THE TYNE Bruce Rae, 1983In the context of the threat, from the Thatcher government’s de-industrialisation policies, to the Tyne’s shipbuilding, Side Gallery commissioned the portrait photographer Bruce Rae to develop this body of work.

NORTH SHIELDS Graham Smith, 1981Graham Smith was a member of the Amber collective from 1974 to 1980. His photographs of North Shields formed part of the same North Tyneside group show that included Isabella Jedrzejczyk’s Jungle Portraits, but were taken in the 1970s.

CONSETT Graham Smith, 1982Although the Side Gallery exhibition wasn’t presented until 1982, Graham began to document Consett and its steelworks in the late 70s, when the threat of closure became evident. The steelworks closed in 1980.

EASINGTON, AUGUST 1984 Keith Pattison, 1984An Artists’ Agency commission enabled Keith to focus on Easington and its the police siege of the village during the Miners’ Strike. The exhibition was toured extensively by Side and he has recently published the work as No Redemption.

MEADOW WELL: An English Estate Steve Conlan, 1991Developed from the late 1980s, Steve Conlan’s work went hand in hand with the making of Amber’s film Dream On. The anti-poll tax demonstrations were in 1990. There were riots on the estate in September 1991.

STEEL WORKS Julian Germain, 1989Julian Germain presented his own documentation of Consett, ten years after the closure of the works, together with earlier documentations of the town including that of Graham Smith, Don McCullin and local photographer Tommy Harris.

VILLAGE IS A GLOBAL WORLD Jindrich Streit, 1994Czech photographer Streit’s documentation grew out of the Crook International Photography Project in 1992 and 1993, which brought photographers from Europe and the wider UK together with a number from North East.

UNCLEAR FAMILY Peter Bialobrzeski, Dana Kyndrova, 1993The group show Unclear Family grew out of the Crook International Photography Project and was organised by Amber photographer Richard Grassick and involved Bialobrzeski, Kyndrova, Jindrich Streit, Steve Conlan and many others. Other Unclear Family projects were developed in Cheb County (Czechoslovakia), The Somme (France) and the Ruhr Valley in Germany.

HINTERLAND, Chris Steele-Perkins, 2006One of Side Gallery’s Coalfield Stories commissions, Chris began documenting animal cultures in County Durham with a look at Haswell Plough Mart in 2002. He continued the work through until the exhibition in 2006. The work was nate published as Northern Exposures.

ALL DRESSED UP Karen Robinson, 2005An exploration of the lives of teenage girls and young women in East Durham, Karen’s exhibition was one of Side Gallery’s Coalfield Stories commissions. She began work in May 2004.

SHIFTING GROUND Dean Chapman, 2000/2005One of Side Gallery’s initiating Coalfield Stories commissions, Dean’s began work in 1997, focusing on South West Durham, Durham City and Sedgefield. There was an initial exhibition in 2000 and then a more developed version in 2005.

FATHERS Peter Fryer, 2001Looking at the lives and families of two men in Seaham who had taken on primary carer roles in the aftermath of broken relationships, Fathers was another of the initial Coalfield Stories commissions. Barrie and Callum Gough also took leading roles in Amber’s film Shooting Magpies (2005).

GOAF: Landscapes from the Durham Coalfield Simon Norfolk 2005Another of Side Gallery’s Coalfield Stories commissions, Simon named his exhibition from a Durham mining term: ‘A space or void from which the coal pillars that support the roof have been removed. Eventually the pressure re-consolidates the whole, the surface subsiding.’

TRUE / GRIT FILM SEASONA CELEBRATION OF NORTH EAST FILMS THAT EXPLORE THE FALLOUT FROM THE THATCHERITE VISION /

BOOK ONLINE AT WWW.AMBER-ONLINE.COM

THURSDAY 6 JUNE / 7.30PM / £5/£4WHEN THE DOG BITESPenny Woolcock / Trade Films / 1988With an eye for the absurd, Penny Woolcock blends explores politics and comedy in an exploration of Consett’s experience, deal-ing with the closure of its steel works. Beautifully and imaginatively shot, the angry, rueful and politically analytical voices join with the escapists, escapologists and drag acts in a celebration of survival that divided opinion at the time. +NORTHMaxim Ford / Trade Films / 1986An ambitious, musically-scored visual portrait of North East England as it dealt with the recession of the 1980s, the deindustrialisa-tion policies of the Thatcher government and the costs of community opposition. Using time-lapse, slow motion, double exposure, long and very wide angle lenses, it brings together history and politics: a projection of the people of the region and of its landscapes as metaphor. Music composed by Richie Close.

THURSDAY 13 JUNE / 7.30PM / £5/£4SEACOALAmber Films / 1985 / 82 mins Betty and her daughter are introduced to the seacoaling way of life by Ray, the offer of a caravan on a cliff top and its Klondyke promises preferable to the violent marriage she has left behind.Her struggle for survival is set against those of the seacoaling community, living on the fringes of capitalism. Despite the exploitation by a local entrepreneur, run-ins with dole snoops and School Board men and the ever encroaching regulations of a hostile council, their lives retain an anarchic romance captured in the film’s lyrical style.

THURSDAY 20 JUNE / 7.30PM / £5/£4UNITED KINGDOMRoland Joffe / 1981 / 90mins‘I write for television because I’m interested in revolution,’ argued writer Jim Allen at a Side Cinema event in 1982. A BBC Play for Today, set in Gateshead’s Dunston Rocket, it is as fiercely anti-government as it is ambitious in its scope and has been described as ‘one of the last hurrahs of... committed (television) political drama.’ Val McLane, Bill Patterson and Colin Welland star. The screening will include video footage of Jim Allen talking at Side Cinema.

SUNDAY 23 JUNE / 3PM / FREENO REDEMPTION Easington 1984 Multi Media screening event with Keith PattisonAn invitation to view and discuss Keith Pattison’s work in progress, which revisits his images of Easington Colliery during the 1984 miners strike. The multimedia piece will combine well-known images and look to contextualize them further through the inclusion of previously unpublished image sequences. It is hoped that this will introduce a deeper narrative and further explore the events and issues surrounding the strike. Keith Pattison will be present to introduce and discuss his work during the event and looks forward to hearing your thoughts, comments and suggestions.

THURSDAY 27 JUNE / 7.30PM / £5/£4THE SCARAmber Films / 1997 / 114minsLike many women active during the miner’s strike, May Murton (Charlie Hardwick) has been left to clean up the mess. The closure of the pit, a failed marriage and the community’s disintegration have shattered both her personal and political beliefs. Her teen-age children are out of control. Her estranged husband has taken up residence in the allotments. At a dance, the night before the Durham Miners’ Gala, May meets Roy Cotton the recently arrived manager of an open cast mine.