The main reason for my day on Edinburgh was an exhibition in Stills, a small ‘centre for photography’ in the centre of Edinburgh which includes gallery space as well as labs or ‘production facilities’ as they prefer to call them.
The exhibition I wanted to see was ‘Women Photographers from the AmberSide Collection‘ and included work by female photographers from the North East of England alongside names like Diane Arbus and Martine Franck. The Amber film and photography collective was formed in London in 1968 and moved to the North East of England the following year. In 1977, the Side Gallery in Newcastle was opened, its main aim to show documentary photography with a particular focus on the working classes and marginalised communities of the North East. This exhibition includes the work of a number of female Amber members alongside commissioned work and other work from the archive acquired for touring exhibitions.
Of the nine women photographers represented here I was familiar with only four of them; Diane Arbus, Martine Franck, Tish Martha and Susan Meiselas, all of whom I had come across whilst working on the Documentary module. According to the exhibition guide, the AmberSide Collection mostly comprises complete exhibitions or significant bodies of work, the exception here being Diane Arbus and the print on show, ‘Topless dancer in her dressing room, SAN Francisco, 1968′, is the only Arbus in the collection. Interestingly, the exhibition guide warns that ‘this exhibition includes adult content’, and I can only assume it was referring to Arbus’s topless dancer.
Apart from Diane Arbus, the other odd one out in this exhibition for me, was Martine Franck.
Franck had been commissioned to produce work for the Amber Collection and visited the North East with her partner Henri Cartier Bresson in 1978. This work differed from the rest of the work on show in that, rather than focusing on the working classes or marginal communities, it concentrated on the leisure activities of the wealthier classes; grouse shooting, horse trials and dog shows. Was it a deliberate decision on Franck’s part to show the contrasts between the rich and the poor I wonder?
There were two highlights for me in this exhibition. One was the work of Tish Murtha, born and brought up in the North East of England and who studied documentary photography under David Hurn at Newport. Who better to document the communities she knew so well and as she put it, from the inside. Murtha’s work in this exhibition are drawn from 2 projects; ‘Juvenile Jazz Bands’ (1979) and ‘Youth Unemployment’ (1981), the above photograph being from the ‘Youth Unemployment’ series, documenting some the challenges young people in the North East of England faced during the Thatcher years.
The second highlight for me was the work of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen. Born and raised in Finland, Konttinen moved to London in the 1960s to study photography, though dropped out of her course after only a few months. She is one of the founding members of the Amber Collective and moved with them to Newcastle in 1969 where she has lived and worked ever since. Konttinen’s work in this exhibition is drawn from 2 series, Byker and Byker Revisited.
Byker was a working class community of terraced houses in Newcastle that gradually fell under the developer’s hammer destroying ‘not only homes but working class culture and close relationships which were never re-established in the schemes that replaced the so called slums’ (Women Photographers from the AmberSide Collection Exhibition Guide, 2019). Konttinen lived in Byker until her home was demolished so again she was, to an extent, documenting this from the inside.
Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen was invited to photograph the ‘new’ Byker Wall Estate and its people again in 2003. By this time a multi-cultural community; still some of the remaining working class families but now also the home to newly arrived asylum seekers. What I found interesting about this series was that her approach seemed to be quite different, much more negotiated and staged. In the exhibition guide she says ‘perhaps because I had been a foreigner in the original Byker, I found myself particularly drawn to the asylum seekers’ and ‘I invited them to imagine their lives in ‘just one picture’ hoping to create a virtual community through my project’ (ibid)
This exhibition alone was well for venturing into the city of the last Friday before Christmas!
‘Women Photographers from the AmberSide Collection’ is on show at:
Stills Gallery, 23 Cockburn Street, Edinburgh
EH1 1BP
Until 8th March 2020
Sources:
- Youth Unemployment (s.d.) At: http://www.tishmurtha.co.uk/youth-unemployment.html (Accessed 29/12/2019).
- The big picture: Tish Murtha captures youth unemployment in 1980s Newcastle | Art and design | The Guardian (s.d.) At: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/may/26/the-big-picture-tish-murtha-youth-unemployment-newcastle-1980 (Accessed 29/12/2019).
- Any Answers: Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen – British Journal of Photography (s.d.) At: https://www.bjp-online.com/2018/03/aakonttinen/ (Accessed 29/12/2019).
- Stills – centre for photography based in the heart of Edinburgh. (s.d.) At: https://stills.org/ (Accessed 29/12/2019).
- Women Photographers from the AmberSide Collection Exhibition Guide (2019) AmberSide and Stills.
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