STORIES FROM A FILM & PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTION
27th June - 19 September 2015
EXHIBITION TEXTS For over 45 years, the Amber collective has documented communities in the North East of England and celebrated the art of documentary. This is the first major exhibition to look at the collection created through that work: Amber’s own production and the exhibitions commissioned, collected and toured by Side Gallery, which the group opened on Newcastle’s Quayside in 1977. The stories in the collection tell the story of the collective. They capture the details of community experience and the extraordinary changes that have taken place in north eastern lives and landscapes. They include the international contemporary and historical works the group has collected, all of which continue to inspire its work going forward. This exhibition tells Amber’s story from 1969 to 2010. The title is taken from an inscription by Henri CartierBresson on a photograph that he donated in 1978. Amber Guiding Principles:
Integrate life and work and friendship. Don’t tie yourself to institutions. Live cheaply and you’ll remain free. And, then, do whatever it is that gets you up in the morning. Early Amber ‘Manifesto’ for an ideas factory. As spokesman of his community, the secrets [the artist] must utter are theirs. The reason why they need him is that no community altogether knows its own heart; and by failing in this knowledge a community deceives itself on the one subject concern¬ing which ignorance means death. RG Collingwood, Principles of Art, 1938 Quoted in Amber’s River Project, 1974 Memory is an unreliable tool. Murray Martin, Amber founder member
1968 – 1979: Collecting Documents of Working Class Culture The Amber collective came together in London in 1968 around the vision of Murray Martin (1943 – 2007): ‘Some people chose butterflies... I sought to reconnect myself with the working class culture and community which had nurtured me.’ He saw documentary as an act of collecting and he collected the people through whom the work could be done. The Finnish photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen was among the founder members who came north with Martin in 1969. For more than a decade the collective supported itself through freelance university lecturing and television production work. Konttinen even did a stint as a go-go dancer. As a business venture, Amber set up a Higher Education slide library, although the beautiful curiosities it gathered often reflected its own visual enthusiasms more than commercial instinct. The group pooled all of its income and paid a low, egalitarian wage. Threatened with eviction in the landlord flight from Newcastle’s rundown Quayside, in 1975 Amber formed a partnership: the only way it could buy and stay in the C18th / C19th warehouses on Battery Stairs, where it had based itself. Having struggled to find anywhere in Newcastle to show its work, two years later it opened Side Gallery here, a space dedicated to documentary photography. The new gallery led Amber to initiate a programme of commissions and support for other photographers, helping to extend the documentation of the North to which it is committed. The group’s love of the Quayside led to a successful campaign against the city’s plans to demolish much of its Victorian heritage.
1979 – 1991: Landscapes, Lives, Struggles Amber’s celebration of working class communities was in part a reaction to the way education had separated some members from their own. Detailing the work that underpinned these communities has always been important to the collective. Opposition to the politically-driven closures of heavy industry in the 1980s framed the documentation of coal, steel, shipbuilding and unemployment by Amber and the photographers working with Side Gallery. Amber was also drawn to the more ambiguous territories of fishing and seacoaling. Community cultures and experiences have always at the heart of its concerns and in 1986 the group began a five-year residency, basing itself in North Shields. The gallery’s programme of exhibitions brought regular funding to Amber, originally from Arts Council of Great Britain, but then from Northern Arts (now incorporated in the national body). The scale of the photography work increased throughout the 1980s. A Workshop franchise to produce films for Channel 4 was offered in 1982, enabling significant further expansion. Working through the film technicians’ union ACTT, Murray Martin had played
a key role in the negotiations that opened the new channel up to independent radical filmmaking. By the end of the decade things were changing once again. Side Gallery is dedicated to documentary because that is the territory it finds so inspirational. 1989 saw a radical reduction in its funding, when it would not become a Northern Arts ‘Key Strategic Organisation’ promoting all kinds of photography. At this time, Channel 4 also began to move away from its support for the Workshop Movement.
1987 – 1996: Bringing It All Back Home Three years before the Berlin Wall came down, a meeting at a film festival in Poland led to an exchange project with the East German documentary studio DEFA. In the fishing and shipbuilding town of Rostock, Amber Films made From Marks & Spencer to Marx and Engels. At the same time, Side Gallery began to open up relationships with the independent Galerie 4 in Cheb, Czechoslovakia. Plans to bring exhibitions over were already underway when the borders opened. Amber moved its creative focus to County Durham and, inspired by what it had seen in Cheb, in 1993 organised an International Photography Workshop in Crook, looking at the experience of family. Photographers from Czechoslovakia, France and Germany brought their own work to Side; Unclear Family workshops took place in Luby, Amiens and Borbeck over the next three years. In 1991, Side Gallery closed for six months adjusting to the Northern Arts funding cuts. It re-opened, showing exhibitions on just one floor. The programme was integrated with an extensive community touring circuit. On the filmmaking front, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s year-long return to Finland was documented. Resisting the offer of bigger budgets for a more commercial film, one of Amber’s most personal dramas, Eden Valley, was made with the harness racing community in Durham. It drew on the continuing relationship with the Laidler family, who, as seacoalers on Lynemouth beach, had collaborated with Amber and Chris Killip ten years earlier.
1997 - 2010: Elegies & Renewals By 1996 it was no longer possible to sustain the community touring and Side’s own exhibitions were increasingly reliant on the collection. In 1998 Amber convened a special group to look at the gallery’s future. With no new arts money on the table, Amber’s consequent decision to rebuild both the exhibitions and the photography production was largely a leap of faith.
The BBC commissioned the first two feature films in what was to become a coalfield trilogy. The new gallery group, including Amber members and independent photographers, committed themselves to linked photographic projects in the post-industrial coalfield. The incoming Regional Arts Lottery Programme then created the opportunity to expand this into the twelve commissions of Coalfield Stories. Side Gallery had begun to rebuild its Northern Arts funding and in 2002 expanded to showing exhibitions on two floors again, enabling it to open up creative relationships with a range of new photographers. Northern Rock Foundation support enabled the filmmakers to complete the coalfield trilogy. Amber was working on a new film about harness racing culture in 2007 when Murray Martin died. The Pursuit of Happiness tells the story of a documentary maker who became part of the community he documented. In 2003 Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen returned to the Byker Wall Estate to pick up her 1970s Byker photographs, which were on display at a community centre. She found the work being used to explain the community to the asylum seekers who were now being housed there. She began to work on Byker Revisited, drawing Amber back into an engagement with urban Tyneside. In 2010 Amber became a community interest company, making it easier for new members to join the collective and take things forward.
2015: Access, Engagement & AmberSide Trust With the support of Heritage Lottery Fund, Arts Council England, Paul Hamlyn Foundation and others, Amber has launched a three-year programme, developing access to and engagement with its film and photographic collection. This exhibition at the Laing is part of that work. The ambitious renewal of Side Gallery’s exhibition activity, begun in 1999, eventually coincided with a revived interest in documentary and audiences have continued to grow for the work. Amber’s access and engagement programme will see the redevelopment of the gallery and improved housing of the collection. An ambitious schedule of digitisation will see a significant increase in the film and photography made available on a completely rebuilt Amber website. The collection is also being used to inspire filmmaking, photography and exhibition projects in schools and with community groups across the North East. AmberSide Trust has been established, bringing long term security to the collection, supporting conservation, access, the building of public awareness and, importantly, the continuation of the work. It is a living archive.
For Ever Amber: Exploring the Traditions of Documentary Opened by Amber in 1977, Side Gallery took the opportunity to exhibit and tour the work of some of the world’s great documentary photographers. It was particularly attracted to photographers who offered a model of practice: a scale of social engagement, a relationship to a particular community or geographical area. As with the contemporary international work it was showing, where it could, it used touring income to buy complete exhibitions, so it could continue to show the work. There was a similar commitment to exploring the North East’s own documentary traditions, both its great industrial photographers and those who documented their own working class communities.
Laing Art Gallery . New Bridge Street . Newcastle upon Tyne. NE1 8AG Gallery opening times: Tuesday to Saturday: 10am - 5pm | Sunday: 2pm - 5pm Closed Mondays (except bank holidays)
AMBER