One of the Tribe: The documentary photography of Mik Critchlow

from RPS The Decisive Moment - Edition 21 - February 2021

by Documentary Group, Royal Photographic Society

Sofa to Shed - Ray Hobbs ARPS

Ian Wright ARPS

Mik Critchlow is a British Social Documentary Photographer based in the North East of England. He began a long-term photography project documenting his home town of Ashington, Northumberland. The son of a miner, he has worked in the community with a deep-rooted empathy for the townsfolk, documenting the area and it’s people during a period of social and environmental change.

His work is held in public and private collections and has been exhibited and published widely including: Side Gallery, Amber-Side Collection, Brunel University, Durham Art Gallery, Arts Council England, Northern Arts, The British Journal of Photography, and Creative Camera.

He recently published Coal Town, his long term project about Ashington, his home town. Coal Town, is published by Bluecoat Press. In November 2020 he gave a talk as part of the RPS Documentary Group’s Engagement series. For this feature he was interviewed by Ian Wright ARPS.

Mik’s work can be found here: www.mikcritchlow.com

I first met Mik Critchlow when I booked him to speak at the Lincolnshire Photographic Association’s annual Day of Photography in March 2018. He came to stay with us for the weekend. Fortunately for me, it turned into two weekends because the “Beast from the East” dumped impassable snowfalls on the Lincolnshire Wolds on the Saturday evening, leading to the postponement of the Sunday event and its re-arrangement six weeks later. So Mik and I had a lot of time to talk photography.

Mik is a rarity. He has documented his hometown of Ashington, Northumberland since 1977 and, as ‘one of the tribe’ (a phrase he often uses), with deep roots in the area it has given him unique access and opportunity to photograph the community.

Mik’s photography is exceptional in its depth and range, its integrity and sensitivity, consistency of style and technique. Like its author, it speaks softly and communicates much, simply by showing us the reality. His work illustrates the significance of narrative and purpose, and the historical importance of building a body of work over time. Not for profit, but because it matters.

I’ve seen him giving presentations to audiences and, within moments, there is an immediate warmth and emotional connection to Mik and his images. The stories he attaches to each group of images resonate with the rich humanitarian tradition of documentary photography Mik so knowledgeably embraces. His work is deeply political, but he doesn’t hit you over the head with it, more often simply stating ‘that’s the way it was’.

Born in 1955, Mik does not romanticise working class life in the mining area he grew up in. Life was tough and insecure, money often short, living conditions unimaginable to anyone under 45 today. Mining was hard physical work, dangerous and hazardous, coal dust a killer, ‘white finger’ a common consequence of the constant use of hand-held machinery.

My own upbringing in an east coast dock and railway town near a major fishing port, witnessed many of the unattractive realities of these communities; the frequent ‘fallings-out’, the central role of alcohol, the mayhem of Saturday night brawls, the sharp gender divides shocking to today’s sensibilities, the frequency of youthful pregnancies. But there was community and a life lived in common, shared values and beliefs, generation following generation.

Mik says the miners ‘all loved their work. What they loved was the camaraderie and the craik. There was such a sense of belonging they’d go to work then go to the club in the evening together and there’d be the same level of camaraderie in social life as what they had in their work. It was shared existence, everybody had nothing, they all had nothing, yet it was rich in humanity’.

In my view, Mik deserves to stand alongside James Ravilious and his record of a North Devon rural community, as an important and significant chronicler of English community life. What James Beacham wrote in his Guardian obituary of Ravilious (October 1999), could equally be said of Mik Critchlow.

‘Time after time a Ravilious photograph brings out some aspect of our common humanity. His pictures resonate with integrity and spiritual power, conveying, just like a great painting, so much more than the subject they ostensibly portray. Ravilious’s own modesty, both of character and life-style, allowed him to be an ordinary member of the society in which he was living and working; in turn, his presence as a photographer was accepted by his subjects as part of everyday life.’

The Ashington images cover a period of dramatic upheaval for the workforce of industrial Britain, one of transformative social, economic, global, and technological change. Change, which time has confirmed, has not been for the better for those ordinary people he lived, and lives, among and for whom he has such a deep understanding and affection.

In the process of over 40 years of photography, he has compiled an archive of over 50,000 negatives. His work has been exhibited and published widely, and Coal Town, a wonderful selection of 200 immaculately reproduced images primarily from the 1970s and 1980s, was published as a large format hardback by Bluecoat in 2019. Hopefully, there are many more publications to come from this body of work, all the more remarkable because he has never made a full time living from his photography.

More recently, between 2015 and 2018, Mik was commissioned by the Creative People and Places Programme, bait, to photograph in East Ashington, the area where Mik has always lived. A softback limited edition catalogue was published in 2018, simply called Hirst – the local name for the area.

The backdrop and context for Mik’s photography is of Ashington as a microcosm of the emergence of a post-industrial society and the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy. The resulting inequalities and social and regional divisions have been laid bare during the COVID-19 crisis. In his evocative introduction to Coal Town, Derek Smith summarises the consequences:

‘Ashington has lost its sense of being. It hasn’t a purpose anymore. Coalmining has gone and it’s never going to come back, that was the whole reason for its existence’

Mik says that he is an accidental photographer. Leaving home in 1970, aged 15, he returned with an ambition to become a graphic designer, and specifically to design album covers. A photographic module on the course he started at the local college was to change his life.

A 35mm camera planted in his hand, he began to photograph what he knew, what was at hand and what was close to his heart. In 1978 Mik’s artist’s statement for grant funding at the college became a reality which has lasted for the rest of his life. ‘I see my work within the context of a long-term plan, documenting the area in which I was born, educated and now live during periods of social change’.

Derek Smith recalls having the privilege of seeing Mik at work.

‘Unobtrusive, at ease in establishing a rapport with his subjects, respectfully close with his wide-angle lens, it seemed people warmed to him and trusted him. It was the 1979 Durham Miners’ Gala – Arthur Scargill revealed that huge quantities of coking coal was being secretly imported by the government, in his hand a secret pit closure hit list. Perhaps the beginning of the end for coal we thought, and we weren’t far wrong. Mik’s gentle approach and respect for people meant you knew he would never exploit anyone, and the practice has barely changed across 40 years of photography.’

Andrea Hawkin’s introduction to Hirst, reflects the warmth and respect Mik universally attracts:

‘His intimate knowledge, love for the people and place made him the ideal artist for a commission to work in the area. His photographer’s eye is unflinching, unsentimental, and full of respect for the people he says are “often seen in the corner of your eye but disregarded”. He wandered the streets for 18 months talking to people and documenting a world marginalised or invisible to those living beyond Hirst’s parameters. His aim was to make visible their friendships, resilience and humanity, the photographs made possible by the openness of people willing to share their life experiences.’

If Mik was thrown into photography unexpectedly, his early images from 1977 to 1980 clearly show his natural eye, and in this period, he quickly acquired other influences and encouragement. The Ashington Group of pitmen painters – naïve, paintings of the mundane and the everyday – showed Mik that the ordinary could be interesting. A Cartier-Bresson exhibition made a deep impression. He began a long, and continuing association with the Side Gallery in Newcastle in 1980, receiving support and encouragement from mentors Murray Martin, Chris Killip and Graham Smith. It was to be seven years until he had his first exhibition at the Side Gallery but in that time, he built up an extensive body of work, including commissions from Northern Arts to photograph, for example, the Durham Miners Gala.

He speaks a good deal about photography and memory. His images are ‘acts of remembrance’. If people and places and social existence are not recorded, they are forgotten. Mik admits to being a different person with a camera in his hand; trust is the key:

‘I’m a very shy person, and photography has helped me. I put my head above the parapet, just to have a look, to see what’s going on. It’s different when I’ve got a camera and it’s a passport into other people’s lives. As long as they don’t think you’re doing something untoward or sinister. You’ve got to build up trust.’

In my article on Larry Fink in this issue of the Decisive Moment, I quoted Gerry Badger on the concept of “thereness”. While very different to Fink’s subjects and style, Mik shares this ability to take the viewer to the time and place when the image was frozen; the sense that we are looking at the world directly, we can feel the atmosphere in the working men’s clubs, smell the beer, hear the excitement of the boys playing football in the street where the Charlton brothers were born, overhear the ladies gossiping in the hairdressers and feel the freezing water on the Boxing Day dip.

Mik’s shooting style is certainly part of this. He likes to get in close, using two-andquarter medium format – or a 5:4 – commonly in portrait format, and often using a shallow depth of field. Only ‘one of the tribe’ could have made these images, the camera effectively invisible. It’s astounding that Mik only took a single shot of a subject – film was precious and expensive.

He shows us the universal in the particular and he reminds us that, ‘in photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotif’ (Henri Cartier-Bresson).

And his photography gives meaning and support to Dorothea Lange’s well-known comment: ‘While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.’

I’m very grateful to Mik for allowing me to include a selection of his Coal Town photographs here. Many were made when simply walking around in his daily life as the ordinary aspects of existence unfolded before him or having a pint at one of the 26 social clubs that existed in the town in the early 1980s. Or following up happen-chance conversations or encounters leading to excursions into the local hairdressers or to visit the staff as the local cinema closes down. Other images are the result of dogged persistence. Getting permission from the National Coal Board to photograph in Ashington Colliery as it closed down in 1988 was only possible because of the help of Ian Lavery, a highly respected union official.

Annual events like the Durham Miners Gala or Miners Picnic were of interest to him as were community events – whippet racing, the Boxing Day dip at Newbiggin, Wednesday Bingo. He photographs family and neighbours, tipsy first footing on New Year’s morning, shopkeepers in the town, the sea coalers, and their ramshackle camp.

His shots of the street layout of the town and the panoramas of colliery, power station and town are charged with atmosphere and give such a visceral sense of place; his portraits come alive, models of focus and lighting and the relationship between photographer and subject – remember, he took just one shot! He is alert to humour and the incongruence of juxtapositions. His detail shots, for example, the pile of discarded miners’ kit and clothing in the pit closing down images, are masterpieces of symbolism.

Above all, the effortless grasp of composition and the judgement of timing produces imagery which illustrates the power that documentary photography at its best can have in this image-saturated world. At their most profound, photographs can become part of our collective memory – photographs are ‘information about the past, in the present, and are saved for the future’. The difference between the millions of disposable and inconsequential images made each day in the digital universe and the carefully crafted images of a Mik Critchlow, is that such documentary photography has – or should have – consequences:

‘The best documentary photography is neither pure art nor pure fact. It is both. It evokes memories, elicits stories, and stimulates ideas. It says, stop, damn it, and witness what I have witnessed’ (David Friend, quoted in Michelle Bogre, Documentary Photography Re-considered).

The “Documentary Impulse” has a number of definitions. I prefer Robert Coles in Doing Documentary Work:

‘Rooted it childhood, an eagerness to catch hold of, to catch sight of, to survey and inspect, to learn and then convey to others what the eyes have taken in, this restless insistence upon taking the measure of things, figuring them out … so that others may become fellow witnesses – therein lies the documentary impulse’.

Spending time with Mik’s photographs over the last month – and listening to a recent zoom presentation, reminded me a comment by Sebastiao Salgado:

‘When you spend time on a project, you learn to understand your subjects. There comes a time when it is not you who is taking the pictures. Something special happens between the photographer and the people he is photographing. He realises that they are giving the pictures to him.’

I commend Mik’s photography to you; it is an exemplary body of work and a collection destined to be an important historical record. Any aspiring documentary photographer or lover of photography would be wise to have Coal Town on their shelves.

Ian Wright ARPS - iangwright@hotmail.com