About Us
Amber History - 1979 to 1990
Exploring Social Documentary
Lewis Hine poster
In the early days of the gallery, the group’s content-led social agenda had been signaled with a Lewis Hine show. With a gallery and a cinema at its disposal, Amber began to explore the work of earlier photographers and filmmakers who seemed relevant. It had earlier initiated a series of Filmmakers Talking events at Tyneside Cinema, which had brought together Edgar Anstey, Robert Vas, Bill Douglas and Mike Grigsby. The group was also in contact with Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz. Cartier-Bresson celebrated his 70th birthday at Side in 1979, and his partner Martine Franck developed her North of England survey for the gallery at the same time. Veteran of the USA Farm Securities Administration photography of the 1930s, Russell Lee was interviewed on a visit to Side in the early 1980s. His American Mining Communities was acquired from the Library of Congress. A Robert Doisneau collection was acquired through a visit to the photographer in Paris. Photographs by August Sander, Martin Chambi and others were also acquired, shown in the gallery, and toured. Chris Killip was an important influence in identifying some of the historical avenues that were pursued; advised by him, Murray was a central figure in the acquisitions of work.
Weegee
Entertainers at Sammy's on the Bowery, Weegee
Side Gallery has become known for its collection of Weegee photographs, probably the largest outside the USA. Following the organisation of the first UK tour of his work, his widow Wilma Wilcox was interviewed. She remained in regular contact throughout her later years and felt that Weegee would have approved of Amber's approach to showing the photographs. A substantial collection of Weegee’s work was given to Amber. The contact that Amber made at this time with Weegee's (and Robert Frank's) printer Sid Kaplin, led to him printing Exit Photography Group's Survival Programmes: In Britain's Inner Cities for Side. Before Wilma Wilcox died, Murray advised on the final direction of Weegee's photographic estate, which was ultimately left to the Institute of Contemporary Photography in New York. While in the States, he also took the opportunity to contact Boris Kaufmann, Jean Vigo’s cameraman and the brother of Dziga Vertov.
The Untrained Eye
South Shields, Laurie Wheatley, 1934
A policy of retrieval also saw the acquisition of classic documentary from the North of England. While working at Side, Derek Smith put considerable effort into bringing Jimmy Forsyth’s photographs of Scotswood Road in the 1950s and 60s to a wider public. The Hartlepool photographer David Wise brought Mary Gillens’ photographs of the Durham mining village of Wheatley Hill, begun in the 1920s. Graham brought photographs by his father Albert Smith. Some of this work, together with photographs by Laurie Wheatley, Jimmy Forsyth and Mary Gillens was presented in an exhibition, titled The Untrained Eye, in 1990. As well as the work of the photographers as the ones who documented The Building of the Tyne Bridge for Dorman Long, these rich examples of people who have documented their own communities have remained important to Amber.
Early Film Dramas
Tom Hadaway in The Filleting Machine
Documentary for Amber has always gone hand in hand with drama. An early student production in London even provided the first screen role for Joanna Lumley, but the main focus of experiment has been in the territory of social realism and working class lives. Unhappy with the initial script for High Row, the drift miners themselves helped the filmmakers devise another one, which they felt more accurately reflected their working day. They then acted out the dramatisation. The engagement with actors in Live Theatre took explorations in other directions (including That’s Not Me a 1978 documentary following Live actor Tim Healy as he tried stand-up comedy). Some of Amber’s theatre experiments were incorporated in Tyne Lives (1980), a not-entirely-successful attempt at putting a range of projects together in the absence of a budget. In 1981, it took this a step further, making the film drama The Filleting Machine with the writer Tom Hadaway. The script was based on the one he had originally adapted for the workingmens’ club tours of the 1970s.
The Workshop Declaration
Amber’s fortunes considerably changed in 1982 with the arrival of Channel 4 and its commitment to independent production from groups operating under the terms of the ACTT (later BECTU) Workshop Declaration, a ground breaking agreement which allowed cross-grade working and an egalitarian minimum wage structure. Having helped to shape it, the document has acted as Amber’s constitution ever since. The Workshop Movement grew out of a vision of a different kind of industry and was rooted in a regionalist approach. Amber was committed throughout this period to its engagement with the union and the network of independent workshops that flourished under the scheme.
The group also put considerable energy into trying to secure recognition of a waged status for photographers, but the implications worried funding bodies, institutions and many photographers themselves. Where possible, there has always been an interest in encouraging a movement. In the latter days of the broadcaster’s support, Amber had secured the funding for a European network of film workshops, but at the last moment Channel 4 baulked at signing the necessary agreement.
Byker to Seacoal
Seacoal, 1985
In 1982, however, Amber took up a franchise to produce work for Channel 4, which it then held until 1991, when support for the scheme ended. The television channel funded programmes of work. It didn’t have editorial control, but it had an option to buy any of the films that emerged. In 1983, the film of Byker was produced and then Keeping Time, which looked at a North Shields dance school, an engagement continued by Sirkka with the photography project Step by Step, which was eventually completed with publication of a book in 1987.
Channel 4 wanted a feature film, and Murray thought Amber could make one about seacoalers. A small commission for the Ashington photographer Mik Critchlow in the early 1980s had, in consequence, opened access to the seacoaling community at Lynemouth, where one of Mik’s cousins worked. The bleak energy of its raw capitalism had often attracted photographers, Chris Killip among them. The caravan Amber bought on the site housed Chris as he developed his photography project, Seacoal (1984), with its stark images of life at the margins. When he moved out, the Amber crew moved in, making a feature film of the same name, which was released the following year. Ellin Hare, who had come to work on Byker as a film editor, became a member of the group involved in developing Seacoal. Her experience with the London-based Front Room and the Belfast Film Workshop had involved collective approaches to writing, improvisation and the drawing of dramatic stories out of community involvement. The fusion of drama and documentary and the ways of using non-actors that this led to in Seacoal has been the experimental territory of all subsequent Amber feature films. Another structural influence was Equity’s insistence that writer Tom Hadaway could script the actors’ lines but not the non-actors’ responses.
Double Vision & T Dan Smith
T Dan Smith, 1987
The attraction of drama lies partly in the concentration it allows, partly in the protection it offers the people who offer access to their lives. In 1986, Amber made the drama Double Vision, working with members of a boxing club in Hartlepool. The following year, it made T Dan Smith, a feature film which continued the engagement with urban redevelopment that had driven the work in Byker and on Newcastle’s Quayside. Working with the Tyneside politician, who had been responsible for much of the city’s demolitions and redevelopments in the 1960s and early 1970s, and who had gone to prison for his part in the Poulson scandal, Amber interviewed most of the key players in the affair in the North. The film blends the documentary interviews, Murray’s and writer Steve Trafford’s questioning reaction to them and the fictional parallel of a political thriller.
Documenting Communities
Fishing Industry, Nick Hedges
In the late 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, the establishment of the gallery saw a similar expansion in the scope and scale of the photographic documentation of the North. Markéta Luskačová looked at northern Beaches and at Juvenile Jazz Bands. Nick Hedges documented the North Shields Fishing Industry. Ian Macdonald, who brought his earlier work on Greatham Creek to the gallery, developed his work on the industrial reaches of the Tees Estuary.
Tish Murtha explored Youth Unemployment in Elswick, frequently using members of her own family in the images, and Juvenile Jazz Bands. With a rich sense of his own background in a Teesside steel making community, Graham Smith documented Consett in the impending context of the closure of its steelworks. Wanting to follow a more individual artistic path, Graham left the collective in 1980, but he and Chris Killip continued to work for the gallery until the mid 1980s, both in an advisory capacity and using the context it provided for their documentary projects. In Graham’s case this involved the powerfully explored, personal journey back into the culture of his home town, South Bank.
The group show, North Tyneside, exhibited in 1981, brought together Isabella Jedrzejczyk’s Jungle Portraits, a set of images from a ‘portrait studio’ set up in a North Shields pub, with projects by Sirkka, Graham and Markéta Luskačová. A set of Sirkka’s portraits from the studio in the Jungle was never exhibited, but illustrates the sense of a group practice that was rarely territorial.
Landscapes, Shipbuilding & Coal
Durham Coalfield, John Davies
Elsewhere, John Davies was commissioned to produce Cumbrian Landscapes and portrait photographer Bruce Rae to produce Shipbuilding on the Tyne. Isabella developed Northumberland Landscapes and later, with John Davies, For Druridge, which engaged with a successful campaign against the building of a PWR nuclear reactor on the Northumberland coast. In the early 1980s, it was already clear that there would be some form of showdown between the government and the miners. Alongside work by the film-makers, John Davies was commissioned to produce a landscape work in Durham in 1983 and developed Durham Coalfield a survey of its working sites. The month before the start of the Miners’ Strike, Bruce Rae worked on a meticulous portrait of Easington: A Mining Village. At the height of the strike, with the support of Artists’ Agency, Keith Pattison produced Easington, August 1984, an iconic body of work which was purchased, published and toured widely.
Easington, August 1984, Keith Pattison
For most of the 1980s, the gallery was run by a separate unit within the collective. Ian Tinwell, a key member, brought design skills that helped to shape the distinctive look of Side’s publications in this period. Another key member was the photographer Peter Fryer, who in 1986 began Coke to Coke, documenting the closure of Derwenthaugh cokeworks and the nearby opening of the Metro Centre shopping mall. As with film, the photography work has usually been driven by practitioners and the craft base they bring. Support for the work was achieved through commissions, the negotiation of funding by other agencies and purchase.