Forever Amber
Laing Art Gallery
Newcastle-upon-Tyne
5/5

WORKING-CLASS culture and the lives and landscapes of marginalised communities in north-east England are at the heart of everything the Newcastle-based Amber collective has produced since its foundation in 1968.

Using film and photography, its documentary and creative projects have lasted longer than any comparable initiative in Britain, if not globally.

So it’s astonishing that this new exhibition is the first major retrospective of Amber’s unique collection.

On show are over 150 original, mostly monochrome, photographs and film clips. They capture half a century of economic and political changes in the region and elsewhere.

It’s a small sample of the collective’s vast archive which is being digitised and will be freely available when the refurbished Side Gallery in Newcastle reopens next year.

On show are images from Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s portrait of Byker, a close-knit working class community in the city, and Quayside, a film and exhibition which helped stop the demolition of Newcastle’s historic riverfront.

A striking selection from the 1980s records Amber’s opposition to the Thatcher government’s policies, particularly its assault on the mining industry.

There are dramatic photographs from Keith Pattinson’s time as an embedded photographer in Easington, the Durham pit village under siege by the police in 1984, monumental images by of seacoalers by Chris Killip and beautiful, haunting photographs of communities in economic and social decline by Tish Murtha and Graham Smith.

There are also images of Amber’s collaborative work in East Germany, records of life in the Durham coalfield communities after the destruction of their livelihoods and work by socially committed photographers in the US and Europe.

And there is Byker Revisited, a recent project documenting Konttinen’s return to the rebuilt Byker Wall estate, where she photographed the new residents — mostly refugees and asylum-seekers — with great insight and affection.

Emotional and political solidarity shine out of all the photographs. Nowadays every application for Arts Council funding has to tick the “community engagement” box but Amber photographers have always built genuinely close relationships with their subjects, resulting in warm, honest and intimate images which evoke — and stimulate — empathy and solidarity.

Some images are full of suffering, argument and protest, crying out for social and economic justice. Many more are reflective and compassionate, revealing the unexpected beauty and humour as well as the harshness of everyday life for the poor, the young and the powerless.

The message is that the lives of these kind of people — unemployed youths playing on waste ground, resilient women grouped round a fire on the seacoalers’ beach, striking miners’ families resisting state aggression — were, are and always will be meaningful, important and beautiful.

Though politically aware and purposeful, Amber’s art is not polemical but a subtle and effective cultural challenge to dominant, metropolitan and bourgeois conceptions of what is beautiful, true and just. As photography critic Gerry Badger said, the photographs are “taken from the point of view that opposed everything Thatcher stood for.” 

Demonstrating that photographic art is more than individualistic expression, this is truly a people’s photography in its humanism, collectivism and class consciousness.

Uniting documentary history and radical politics, it’s a powerful memorial to lives and times gone by, a protest against injustice past and present and a moving inspiration for a better future.

Runs until September 19. Free. Opening times: twmuseums.org.uk. Amber collective images can be viewed at: amber-online.com