About Us
Amber History - 1973 to 1979
Animations
Jellyfish, 1973
Peter Roberts had brought with him the animation A Film (1969), when he joined the collective and made Jellyfish in 1973. Both experimented with manipulating photographs, and presaged the structural use of still imagery in Byker, Keeping Time, The Writing in the Sand and Letters to Katja. Unlike the rest of the film catalogue, Amber’s animation work has always been individually-driven. The one that got away was, appropriately, The One That Got Away, an adaptation of a Tom Hadaway short story about a conger eel, begun in the 1970s but never completed.
The Tyne Documentaries
High Row, 1973
Continuing from Launch, the group began a series of industrial documentaries. High Row (1974) is about a small drift mine above the South Tyne valley. Unhappy with an initial script, the miners themselves collaborated with Amber on a dramatic reconstruction of their working day. Bowes Line (1975) documents the George Stephenson built incline railway linking Kibblesworth Colliery with Jarrow Staithes. As with High Row, for Last Shift (1976) Amber paid the workers for a week’s filming. The Swalwell brickworks had closed the previous week, but with the owners unaware or unconcerned, they were simply re-employed so their work could be documented. Glassworks (1977) records a Lemington factory, that specialised in blowing industrial glass from carboys into the remarkable precision of capillary tubes. These all drew extensively on the advice of the Tyneside social historian, Stafford Linsley, who pointed the group towards territory that needed recording in an era of rapid change. Amber's interest has, at times, seemed like a curse, as closure or demolition has followed in the wake of so many of its projects. In a rare international foray, the group sealed the GDR’s fate in 1988, visiting Rostock to make From Marks & Spencer to Marx & Engels.
Portraits
Mai, 1974
1969's Maybe is essentially a portrait. This strand of Amber's work continued with Mai (1974), which represented the completion of a project begun in Amber's student days. This was a portrait of an Irish/Persian eccentric collector, Mai Finglass, Murray and Sirkka's Portobello Road landlady when they were in London. In 1978, Amber made Laurie, a film portrait of Laurie Wheatley as he worked on a sculpture of a shipyard welder, which stands in Side Gallery to this day. A member of the group of working class artists that emerged in South Shields in the 1930s, alongside the Ashington painters and the Spennymoor Settlement, Laurie was an important link to that earlier flowering of culture concerned with northern working lives and landscapes. When Sirkka’s Byker toured China, it was in a joint exhibition with paintings from the Ashington Group. Laurie was commissioned by Amber in the early 1970s to document the changing face of Tyneside, the river and its shipbuilding industry.
Collective Approaches to Survival
Throughout the 1970s both Sirkka and Graham Smith developed a series of documentations in the region, some of which were developed around Amber’s different short films, some of which grew out of broader group projects, some out of individual pursuits. Throughout this period, Amber survived largely through paid work and the business ventures it established. Crewing for commercials and BBC arts programmes, the production of giant blow-ups for TV sets, and a major commissioned documentation making the case for a rapid transit system that became the Tyne & Wear Metro - all helped hone the group’s technical skills. The business ventures included Graham Smith’s frame making, recycling driftwood timber from the river’s shipbuilding, and Lambton Visual Aids, an educational slide library for which Sirkka spent much of her time photographing and copying images. One of the LVA areas of specialty was architectural detail, which was documented extensively in the North East and in Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool. Graham Denman, primarily a cameraman, but deeply knowledgeable in the all areas of Amber’s equipment needs, was himself, extremely adept at technical innovation, and created a slide copier that produced higher quality work than any of the systems available on the market. In 1979, he left to pursue a career in higher education.
All the partners’ earnings were pooled and an equal wage paid. It was this essential principle of the collective that initially allowed the group to generate a wage for Lorna, to be an administrator, a role which came to provide the glue which held Amber together at a time when disparate activities pulled members in so many different directions. It was a principle that prompted some to leave, but it has also played a major role in developing the sense of common purpose and mutual reliance that sustains the group. Although interpreted more flexibly these days, it has continued to the present time.
Towards the Gallery
Laurie, 1978
In 1972, Sirkka Liisa Konttinen was appointed as the Northern Gas, Northern Arts Fellow in Creative Photography. The photographer Chris Killip, who arrived in Newcastle in 1975 to succeed Sirkka in the fellowship, expressed surprise at the extent and sophistication of Amber’s work, and at the same time, its apparent ignorance of much of the contemporary photography world. Amber has often been accused of willful ignorance. There is an element of truth in this, but the work usually draws enthusiastically on a catholic range of historical and contemporary influences. The structural commitment to craft values, the concern for content, and the interest in regionally rooted practice has often placed it at odds, however, with dominant trends in arts practice.
The group felt a vacuum after The River Project. It was also frustrated by the lack of exhibition outlets for both film and photography. Threatened with eviction, its landlord having joined the exodus of businesses from Newcastle’s Quayside, it took the decision to purchase the buildings. Amber’s history has been marked by a preference to buy and to trade, rather than rent or hire, and the group has always worked creatively with the security and flexibility this offers. In its new space, it developed workshops, darkrooms, a gallery committed to documentary photography and a cinema which would show independent film while occasionally doubling up as a theatre which could stage plays. It was a scale of activity that began to draw in revenue funding from the Arts Council and the Northern Arts.
Side Gallery & Cinema
The complex of buildings, which houses Side Gallery and Cinema, was opened in 1977 with photographer Ron McCormick engaged as the first gallery director. Possibly not a collectivist by nature and certainly more focused on visual arts agendas than Amber felt comfortable with, his tenure was short-lived, but he launched the gallery at a level which ensured a national profile. Chris Killip, who had become increasingly involved with the group and engaged with its philosophy, volunteered to take on the role for a year, working within the collectivist context. The group set about redefining policy.
Reaffirming its commitment to documenting and reflecting working class experience, it would also exhibit historical and contemporary photographers with whose work the group felt empathy. This territory is broadly described as ‘documentary in the tradition of the concerned photographer.’ Alongside Chris, for a period, Murray and Graham channeled all their energies into the development of Side Gallery.
Quayside
George, Quayside, 1979
One project from this period, that illustrates the integrated and collaborative nature of the work, was the detailed recording of both Newcastle Quayside’s historic buildings and the people who still worked and lived in them. With the area under the threat of the developer’s hammer, Quayside (1979) used photography and then, with an aesthetic determined by that work, film, in a campaign to conserve the architectural heritage. It reflects Amber’s classic campaigning stance: highlighting an issue through the quality of imagery and narrative; avoiding narrow propaganda.
It’s arguable this project saved much of the area from demolition. Working in an action committee of two, Murray was able to get virtually all the buildings on the Quayside listed, although one wooden café came down overnight in response to its new status.