Byker & Byker Revisited - Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen

Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen was one of the founders of Amber, a photography and film collective that came to Newcastle in 1969. The Amber website can be found here:

http://www.amber-online.com/sections/about-us/pages/introduction

At a recent visit to the Side Gallery in Newcastle, I purchased one of her books entitled "Byker". There is also a sequel called Byker Revisited which has an excellent picture on the front cover of a Staffordshire Bull terrier trying to catch bubbles. I also purchased "Step by Step" as well.

"Byker" is an precious collection of an area, and a culture, that have now been demolished and rebuilt. Similar to the Gorbals in Glasgow, I am of the view that the demolishment & redevelopment of those areas was a mistake.

Sirkka-Liisa moved to Byker when Amber came to Newcastle, and integrated herself into the community. Her personality and "foreignness" (she comes from Finland) enabled her to win the hearts & minds of the community and they allowed her to immortalise Byker and a way of life that has gone forever, replaced by something more material & cold.

The book is an excellent collection of images, and some of them can be seen on the Amber website above. Where some social documentary images can be lacking in aesthetic qualities, hers are both deep, insightful, often humorous and beautifully composed. She makes use of the now demolished rows of terraced streets, which provide delightful repetition and lines as a backdrop for the narrative. Patterns of light & shadow contrast are also capitalised to stunning effect, and I particularly like the appearance of dogs & cats in some of her shots.

Her interiors are also beautifully lit & capture a fashion of clutter that is rarely seen nowadays. Walls are cluttered, carpet patterns are cluttered and mantelpieces cluttered and laid out for visitors. My favourite interior is a shot of someones wall, where they have a picture of a lovely view, complete with pelmet & curtains, and more clutter along the "windowsill" so it looks as though they have a window looking out to the Italian Riviera. The book also contains text, in the form of stories told to the author whilst capturing the images. These add to the photos, in that they capture the spirit of the community in a touching and lightly humorous way.

Stateside Exhibition at the Side Gallery

On Saturday 8 August, I visited the Stateside American Documentary exhibition at the Side gallery in Newcastle. The exhibition was nearly all social documentary, and was entirely in black & white.

By way of background, the gallery was set up by Amber, a photography & film collective. I have found their website to be a rich source of thought provoking material, all the more interesting to me with it being local. A link to the Amber online website is here:

http://www.amber-online.com/sections/about-us/pages/introduction

Amber came to Newcastle in 1969 to create its own "social document" - an exploration of working class and marginalised cultures and of the lives and landscapes of northern communities. It thus had a lot in common with many of the featured photographers in this exhibition, which included Lewis Hine, Russell Lee, Walker Evans etc. They were part of the FSA commissioned photographers to document the lot of poor farmers and sharecroppers brought to the brink of starvation by the Depression. Under Roosevelt's New Deal, the agency was headed by the economist Rexford Tugwell & Roy Stryker. Both men were convinced of the power of photographs to give a human reality to economic arguments, and how right they were.

Russell Lee in particular was well suited to this task as he was happy to spend many months on the road, and had a straightforward "Lets get on with it" attitude. He took honest, decent, non invasive pictures that said to the viewer "These folks have a problem here, lets give them a little help so they can solve it". Russell Lee himself came to Side. I was particularly taken by 2 of his images in this exhibition. One was titled "Weslaco, Texas, 1939" and showed a mother and her 3 children sitting in the dirt; none of the children had shoes. Whilst this was not dissimilar to "Migrant mother" by Dorothea Lange, the most striking feature of Lee's shot was the empty eyes of the mother and her daughter. The soul had been drained right out of them. Put another way, they look utterly pissed off. It is a very natural shot and captures the negative emotion in an empathetic way. This is a link to the photo on the Amber website.

http://www.amber-online.com/exhibitions/american-mining-communities/exhibits/033

The other image by Russell Lee that I was drawn to was "Christmas dinner, Smithfield, Iowa, 1936". Here's the link to the photo:

http://www.amber-online.com/exhibitions/american-mining-communities/exhibits/009

Although the children have shoes, it is evident that they are in great poverty, yet they look quite content - the excitement of Christmas has washed away their worries for the day.

The exhibition also contained an interesting display of children's photography - Wendy Ewald's Portraits & Dreams. Although I confess I did not personally like the images, I though the concept was pure genius. When Wendy Ewald arrive in Kentucky, she wanted to document her new community in a way that would capture the rhythm & soul of the place, but the camera seemed to get in the way. By teaching children photography and helping children "to see", she was able to achieve this document, through the images of the children.

The exhibition also contained some of Berenice Abbott's buildings (even though she is best known for portraiture) - I particularly liked her use of shadow play and strong graphic compositions in those shots.

Exhibition by George Georgiou at The Side Gallery, Newcastle

On Saturday 3 July 2010 I went to a photographic exhibition at The Side Gallery, Newcastle. When I have stumbled upon photographic exhibitions in the past (such as at The Baltic and Queen's Hall, Hexham) I have usually been unimpressed, failing to be inspired by photos of e.g women showing off their private parts (I think that was at the Baltic some years ago, can't remember who the photographer was). So my expectations were fairly low.

However this was not the case at The Side, where I found a gem of an exhibition by George Georgiou entitled "Fault Lines". It was documentary photography, and explored Turkey. The photographer himself lived in Turkey for almost 5 years, and was therefore well immersed in the country to document it. Here's some words by George Georgiou to describe the raison d'etre behind the series.

"Turkey is poised geographically and symbolically between Europe & Asia, the tensions at the heart of the country becoming increasingly severe. There is a fierce struggle between modernity and tradition, secularism & Islamism, democracy & repression - often in unlikely and contradictory combinations.

"Living in Turkey, I was surprised at how quickly change was taking place: landscapes, towns & cities reshaped, and extensive road network under construction, town centres "beautified", and large apartment blocks springing up around every town and city - they are becoming carbon copies of each other".

"The modernization is designed to handle the mass migration from village to city that is transforming Turkey, Istanbul, a city of a million people in 1960, is now one of the world's largest urban sprawls with an estimated population of over 15 million. Meanwhile there is a rapid disintegration of community in Turkish villages and towns, with the new low-cost housing projects based on models that have generally failed in Europe".

The exhibition is also online, and he has a fabulous website which you can find here:

http://www.georgegeorgiou.net/projects.php?groupid=1

Aside from the fascination at looking at the development of a country far removed from my own, here was my thoughts about this particular exhibition.

1. All the images had an extremely large depth of field, and were eye wateringly sharp throughout. Technically 100% accurate. This was much more apparent in the exhibition than online, which highlights the usefulness of actually going to a gallery.
   
2. They had eye catching strong saturated colours, often set against a neutral dull backdrop such as flat grey skies, dull bare earth wasteground, grey concrete or barren mountains.
3. There was a strong sense of scale.
4. The subject matter was extremely interesting and insightful.
5. There were details that caught your eye, such as the mobile phone in the man's hand in the deserted cafe that looks from a bygone era.

In summary, it captured strong content sympathetically, in an aesthetically pleasing and technically competent way.

My favourites from the exhibition were:

• "Turks 2" - the low key panorama images which had spotlighting on people's faces. They were all candid & natural poses, and I particularly liked the image with the bright pink headscarf. It reminds me of a station platform, and I would be interested to know how he produced this.
• The boy playing football and the little boy on the trike outside the yellow housing complex with all the satellite dishes. It's another one of those shots where the triangle formed by the boy's legs as he kicks the ball gives it extra impact.
• The Tailors Shop, Dogubeyazit - everything is green, even his suit, and I love the proud expression on the tailor's face.
  
• Cafe, Kilis - I like the desertion of the cafe, the colours, the plant growing up the wall and then the mobile phone in the man's hand which is so at odds with his surroundings.
• The blue cart on the derserted curved road up to the modern housing blocks, with their bright colours.
• The shot of the bus window
• The image at the end of the exhibition with all the people stood in a large fenced off yard. The strong pattern and brightly coloured clothes again contrasting strongly with the dull background and I am drawn to wonder what they are all doing standing there like that.

The exhibition also highlighted something about Britain which I hadn't really considered before. The images captured the barren bare earth landscape of Turkey. In Britain, every inch of the land is landscaped, manicured, or naturally flourishes. Or that is how it seems. From the fields, hedgerows, or rugged natural beauty of the Lake District, Scottish countryside etc. everything uncultivated is green & beautiful. I believe much of that "uncultivated" land is managed to a degree. Where land is occupied, it is tended & manicured. Although there are exceptions to this (think industrial wastegrounds or run down estates), they are exceptions not the norm. It is something I have taken forgranted. I guess it's a beneficial side effect of a wet climate, and historical investment in infrastructure, where people are paid by the council to cut the grass, manicure the common ground etc. I wonder if it will still be like this in 50 years time when public services are cut to strip out non essentials (like council gardeners & defra subsidies for landowners) and if global warming starts to toast the British climate. Just a thought.

A final point - the gallery itself was in a pretty photogenic location - here's a couple of shots I took whilst visiting.