Tish Murtha | Elswick Kids

Tish Murtha

Elswick Kids

London, UK: Bluecoat Press, 2018

180 pp., 27 x 29 cm. hardcover

Edition size unknown

In the 2023 documentary Tish (which played the Sackville Film Society last night) photographer David Hurn recalls interviewing a young Tish Murtha about why she wanted to attend his photography class. She answered "I want to take pictures of policemen kicking children.”

Few twenty year olds can lay out their MO so succinctly. 

Directed by Paul Sng, who had previously made films about Poly Styrene and The Sleaford Mods, Tish makes the case that her work - largely forgotten at the time of her death in 2013 - is ripe for reappraisal. Her photographs of “marginalised communities from the inside” seem more relevant than ever today. 

She was also a powerful writer. The film unearths grant applications, letters to newspapers and - heartbreakingly - job applications in the final years of her life, where she is forced to list photography as one of her hobbies, alongside taking walks and reading. 

Writing about automation and the corporate promise of increased leisure time, with employees no longer having to endure dull, repetitive tasks sounds like she could be speaking about the impact of AI on the contemporary workforce. But she is writing about the working conditions in the late ’70’s Britain. Her sharp skepticism is clear (with terms like "enforced idleness”) and extends also to the gallery that represented her work, Side Gallery. 

She left the venue that had supported her early in her career out of fear that they wanted to push her work into an "anaesthetized philosophy of working-class culture”. 

From a young teenager she wielded a found camera as a weapon, even without it containing any film. She learned that just by carrying it, pedophiles luring children into their vans could be thwarted. 

This book features images of these kids, her neighbours in the Elswick district of Newcastle Upon Tyne, which was known as "the worst square mile in England”. 

Tish has deep empathy for her subjects and a fierce rage for their situation. The children here, despite the deep poverty and strong sense of hopelessness around them, manage to find joy in the bleakest of surroundings. 

"Elswick Kids is a less strident set of images. They were taken as Tish walked the streets of the working-class district of Elswick in Newcastle Upon Tyne and were not intended to be an exhibition in their own right. Today, though, they tell of a time when children had the freedom of the streets to play in and where friendship blossomed against a seemingly harsh background. The photographs have a stark beauty that shines from every page. Elswick Kids is a vital contribution to our understanding of life in a northern city in the late twentieth century.”

- publisher’s blurb