Amber News

Nothern Lights Film Festival

11th March 2010 By: Graeme Rigby

Northern Lights Film Festival runs from Saturday 20 to Saturday 27 March with a great programme of screenings at Side Cinema, the Tyneside, the Gala in Durham and Star & Shadow. The Side Cinema...more »

Jimmy Forsyth Dies

14th July 2009 By: Graeme Rigby

Jimmy Forsyth, who documented Scotswood Road in the 1950s and 1960s, died on Saturday 11th July 2009. His work stands as one of the great records of its kind - a...more »

The Murray Martin Award

13th February 2009 By: Graeme Rigby

After Amber founder member and key visionary Murray Martin died in 2007, many people suggested that the group should set up an award in his memory, perhaps giving a young filmmaker an opportunity. It...more »

Edgar G Lee

Edgar G. Lee was a Whitley Bay man who lived on Tyneside in the late 1800’s. Not much is known about Lee, except that he was a portrait photographer by profession with a studio in the old Eldon Square in Newcastle. He was, however, more than just a studio photographer as these pictures show.

Lee had an abiding interest in the life of Tyneside, and spent a lot of time outside his studio, in the streets of Newcastle, on the Quayside, at North Shields Fish Quay, and on the beaches of Tynemouth, Cullercoats and Whitley Bay. Lee’s work has a spontaneous quality. He documented the life of Tyneside as he found it, and he has left us with a fascinating glimpse of the way things were nearly one hundred years ago.

During the late 1800’s photographic materials progressed from the wet collodion process with glass plates coated by the photographer immediately before the picture was taken, to the more standardised factory-made dry plate, introduced around 1880.

Lee Collection

from: Photography

Street, river and beach photographs from the late C19th and early C20th by the Tyneside photographer who had a portrait studio in the old Eldon Square in Newcastle.