Side Gallery
About the Gallery
Amber bought its Newcastle Quayside premises in the mid 1970s, opening Side Gallery and Cinema in 1977.
Over my dead body will we show documentary photography, the curator at one of Tyneside’s more prestigious galleries had said. Opening a documentary photography gallery seemed a pragmatic solution to the general problem. The group wanted somewhere to show its work on a consistent basis and having a gallery and small cinema enabled it to do so. Having opened Side Gallery, the need for a coherent policy on what else would be shown became clear. As the group explored the issues, the American photographer Lewis Hine (1874 - 1940) became an important figure in the debate, and his claim for placing content above form; the value of concerned engagement.
The formal quality of imagery has always mattered to Side, but the group has only ever been interested in exhibitions where the content of the work matters - to the photographer and to us. Narrative is as important to the group as the individual photographs. We usually find that the work we respond to has come out of an extended engagement – often one that has developed over several years. It can be personal work, reportage or somewhere between the two. The spectrum includes work that is seen as art and work that is seen as journalism: the distinctions aren’t always helpful or accurate.
Starting from the concerns of the group’s own documentation of working class and marginalised communities in the North of England, Side Gallery began to explore the tradition of concerned documentary with exhibitions by Cartier-Bresson, Russell Lee and others from the US Farm Securities Administration project of the 1930s, featuring Weegee, Chambi, Doisneau, Sander, Vishniac and others. Starting with South Shields photographer James Cleet, it explored northern documentary traditions with exhibitions such as The Building of the Tyne Bridge and Mauretania. An exhibition called The Untrained Eye brought together its interest in working class photographers documenting their own communities: Laurie Wheatley, Jimmy Forsyth, Mary Gillens and Albert Smith, the father of photographer Graham, an Amber member, then associate between 1974 and the mid-1980s.
The group’s own production was expanded with commissions and support for other photographers. Some, such as Chris Killip, Isabella Jedrzeczyk and Peter Fryer, were involved in running the gallery; many simply valued the context it provided: Tish Murtha, John Davies, Marketa Luskacova, Nick Hedges, Bruce Rae, Keith Pattison... The gallery also made a commitment to contemporary photographers documenting issues of concern and marginalised and threatened communities in the wider world: Susan Meiselas, Gilles Peress, Eugene Richards, Chris Steele-Perkins, Graciela Iturbide and many more.
The work continues, broadly following those strands, to the present day. It is a journey of constant discovery. In 1989, gallery funding was reduced from around £120,000 to £25,000, which was problematic. The argument was notionally about funders wanting a generalist approach to photography, but it’s fair to say that social documentary didn’t figure in the visual arts agenda, and in the aftermath of the Miners’ Strike of 1984, some people were distancing themselves from political engagement. The 1990s were difficult. On standstill funding, the group’s alternative, community touring policy proved unsustainable. A group was pulled together to look at the future of the gallery in 1998. It was a choice between knocking it on the head or taking a leap of faith. The group took the second option.
Since 1999 a regenerated commitment to photographic production has seen the different exhibitions of Coalfield Stories. The archive has been re-examined with exhibitions by Weegee and Chambi; River, which explored the documentation of the industrial River Tyne; Susan Meiselas’ curation of El Salvador and Exit Group’s Survival Programmes: In Britain’s Inner Cities, both classic works from the early 1980s. And these have been joined by a host of other great new exhibitions: Simon Norfolk’s For most of it I have no words and Afghanistan: Chronotopia, Jenny Matthews' Women & War, Philip Jones Griffiths' Agent Orange, Sophia Evans’ The Mosquito Coast, Heidi Bradner’s Nenets, A Decade of War in Chechnya and The Lost Boys, Chris Steele-Perkins’ Afghanistan, Leslie McIntyre’s The Time of Her Life and so much more.