Tish Murtha: Works 1976-91

An exhibition curated by Val Williams and Gordon Macdonald with the Tish Murtha Archive.

‘In the Tish Murtha Archive, there is a photograph of Tish, holding a camera, standing at the top of Back Lane in Newcastle. She is around nineteen years old, wearing a dark pea coat and flares. It is one of the very few photographs that exist of her working, and was taken before she left Newcastle, to study documentary photography in Newport in 1977. Her surroundings are familiar – the battered streets and vistas of declining industry were the classic backdrops to Seventies documentary realism, and within them much of post-World War II British photojournalism can be located. Tish Murtha, like many photographers of her generation, stood in the landscapes of modern ruins, of collapse and decay, some, the legacies of wartime bomb damage, others the symbol of Britain’s heavy industrial decline. But for Tish Murtha, this was more than a compelling and symbolic location - it was home ground. Out of this localness, a remarkable body of photographic work emerged.’
(From Tish Murtha: Voices from the Archive by Val Williams. Published in Youth Unemployment, Bluecoat Press, 2017.)

We are proposing a retrospective exhibition of the work of documentary photographer Tish Murtha. Tish was active in photography in the 1970s and Eighties, producing a number of series which explored social politics and living conditions and which tell the stories of lives lived in austere times.

Tish Murtha was born and brought up in the north-east of England. After studying photography locally, she attended the now legendary Documentary Photography course at Gwent College of Further Education, led by Magnum photographer David Hurn.

This exhibition explores the work which Tish Murtha made while she was a student at Newport, in Soho, and when she returned to Newcastle. The show will look particularly closely at the five major series which Tish Murtha made from the mid 1970s to the end of the 1980s- Newport Pub (1997/78); Soho (1979); Youth Unemployment (1980); Juvenile Jazz Bands (1979) and Elswick Revisited (1987-1991).

Using both vintage and new prints, plus material from the extensive collection of papers and materials which now form part of the Tish Murtha Archive, the exhibition will chart of only the work of a remarkably accomplished documentary photographer, but will also give an insight into life in England during a time of transition and social instability.

Tish Murtha’s career in the 1970s and Eighties was startlingly accomplished. Throughout her life she supported herself and her daughter by taking photographs. At a time when only the most persistent and strategically astute (or the independently funded) emerging photographers climbed their way up through the structures of public funding, commissions and editorial work to become established, many, like Tish Murtha, produced compelling work for a relatively short period. Tish’s fierce concentration, her socially critical eye and her commitment to picturing those who fared badly in Margaret Thatcher’s brave new post -industrial world produced a set of photographic series which we are privileged to rediscover.

Writing about Tish Murtha’s work in 2008, writer Sean O Hagen remarked: here is much grittiness and poverty on display here, too, and, everywhere you look, class rears its divisive head, particularly in the photographs. Tish Murtha's black-and-white portrait of a couple lounging on a bed, watched from an adjacent cot by their curious child, is a study in enervation. It is from a series unsparingly entitled 'Youth Unemployment in the West-end of Newcastle', and was taken in 1980. It could, though, be 1930. (Guardian 11.5.2008 ‘Before all the shouting started’.)

The Archive
The Arts Council collection holds twenty Tish Murtha images from the series Youth Unemployment, roughly one third of the complete series. Another fifty vintage prints from the series are in the collection of Side, Newcastle. A substantial collection of photographs, negatives and written and printed material is cared for by the Tish Murtha Archive. Although Tish Murtha’s work never completely disappeared from photographic history, it remained obscure until it was included in the 2008 exhibition ‘Unpopular Culture’, works selected from the Arts Council Collection by Grayson Perry and shown at the de La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill. Tish is a surprisingly elusive figure- there are no filmed or taped interviews, just a few portraits. Since Tish’s death in 2013, Ella Murtha has worked tirelessly to establish Tish’s legacy, using the tools of social media and crowdfunding to raise awareness of the archive.

• http://www.tishmurtha.co.uk