Some photographs make you feel like you’ve been let in on a secret. Tish Murtha’s pictures of Newcastle’s West End did the same for me. The strange part is that they’ve been there all along, a short journey from where I grew up. Tish Murtha was born in South Shields in 1956, grew up in Elswick, and spent her career photographing the children, teenagers and families of Newcastle’s West End. She wasn’t an outsider passing through. These were her streets and her neighbours. Yet no teacher, gallery or school trip had ever mentioned her to me. That’s why I’m writing this. Newcastle should know her name, and so should everyone who studies a short train ride away.
Murtha took her photos from a personal perspective; she was able to photograph the streets, families, and young people with a rare combination of political clarity and proximity. Her photographs don’t treat her people as a spectacle; instead, they show people living in difficult conditions without reducing them to those conditions. Murtha studied photography at Newcastle College before applying to the documentary photography course at Newport College of Art, led by photographer David Hurn. After graduating in 1978, Murtha returned to Newcastle upon Tyne. With her arrival, she began photographing her local community in Elswick. This area which was one sustained by the shipbuilding and industrial economy had experience the effects of industrial decline and political neglect. This resulted in waves of unemployment. Murtha’s photographs capture this history at close range. This is the very reason her work feels so intimate. It captures her streets in a way no outsider could.
Elswick Kids was a series of photographs taken in 1978. Taken mostly in the back streets where Murtha grew up, and the people in it were her friends, neighbours and family. Children climb, skip, watch and wander through their own streets with a freedom that now feels like it belongs to another era. Take Richard and Louise (You can see it in the series on the Bluecoat Press page). Two children sit on a low wall, absorbed in a conversation we can’t hear. Richard leans in with a half-smile, and Louise turns to answer, mid-sentence. Behind them, the street is a blur of running children. Murtha shoots from the children’s height, so we meet them as equals rather than looking down on them. She doesn’t turn the children into victims, and she doesn’t turn childhood into nostalgia either. She records the conditions they lived in, but she also records the imagination and friendship. It’s a kind of honesty you can only get from someone who isn’t looking in from outside, and it makes the more political work that followed hit harder.
Three years later, Murtha made Youth Unemployment, and with that a mood change. By 1981, unemployment was climbing sharply across the North East, and young people were being pushed to the edges of working life. In one photograph, a teenage boy sits in a kitchen with a cigarette in his mouth, eyes fixed on a hand of cards. There is no drama within this photo. He’s sat in a normal kitchen, mugs on the side, late afternoon. This is what makes it stick. Murtha paired her pictures with an essay arguing that unemployment damages identity, confidence and whole communities, and she didn’t soften it. She wrote it’s “the squandering of a whole generation of human potential” (Youth Unemployment in the West End of Newcastle). Her work was strong enough that it was raised for debate in the House of Commons on the 8th of February 1981. If Elswick Kids is tender, this is angry.
So why had I never heard of her? Part of the answer is how slowly her work found an audience. Elswick Kids was never an exhibition in its own right. Murtha died in 2013, and the books that now carry her work were all published after her passing. Youth Unemployment only reached print because her daughter, Ella, ran a Kickstarter campaign. When a large exhibition did arrive, it was at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, not in Newcastle. Only now, with Baltic’s Close to Home, are four of her major series on show together in the North East for the first time. (link Baltic) That is a long wait for photographs of this region, made by one of its own. Being admired by photography specialists isn’t the same as being known by the people she photographed.
These questions she photographed haven’t gone away. The Baltic describes her pictures as a call to acknowledge the inequalities that persist today, and it’s hard to disagree. Young people still worry about finding work; in fact, it’s a worry we all face as university students. Opportunity still depends heavily on where you grow up. Murtha’s photographs don’t offer answers, but they insist that the people at the end of these problems are individuals, with humour, boredom, friendship, and imagination, not statistics. That is something worth learning from, especially as a student in a region of lost history and uneven opportunity.
So go and see them. Close to Home is on at Baltic in Gateshead until 4 April 2027, and it’s a short trip from Durham. I only found Tish Murtha because my dad showed me, and I’d like it to be easier than that for the next person. If you study in the North East, her work is part of the place you’re living in. Go and look at it. Then tell someone else.
Featured image: Touring Club Italiano via Wikimedia Commons