A great and arguably under-celebrated social documentary collection in the UK is having a major retrospective in its home city of Newcastle upon Tyne, in the north-east of England. Forever Amber, celebrating the work of the Amber Film and Photography Collective, opens at the city's Laing Art Gallery today (27 June-19 September).
And if the collective tag should suggest any sense of worthiness, or navel-gazing anti-aesthetic, then banish the thought immediately: in its 47 years of existence, Amber has amassed an extensive photography archive that holds exhibition rights for works by some of the best international documentary photographers. The collection includes photographs by August Sander, Robert Doisneau, Lewis Hine and crime photographer Weegee (of whose work prints can be purchased directly from the gallery).
In 1978 Henri Cartier-Bresson celebrated his 70th birthday at Amber, the Side Gallery gave him a retrospective, and the print he subsequently donated to the collection was inscribed “Forever Amber”, thus giving the show its name.
The collective has also built a collection of work by its own members, films and photographs of the highest standards that provide a unique document of working-class, marginalised and, following the demise of local large-scale industry and shipbuilding, often dispersed communities in region. What would become Amber was founded in 1968 in London, but the original members moved north almost immediately, in search of a strong regional identity outside of the capital.
Amber operates the Side Gallery and the Side Cinema in Newcastle, both named after the street where they are situated—The Side—that runs down almost to the edge of the river Tyne, and provides offices and technical facilities, as well as a base for Amber Films. But as a statement on the website makes clear: “All Amber members are involved in all the different areas of operation.”
The collective’s Graeme Rigby (whose loose “territory” is film production, the gallery and the archive) told us: “I think there is a natural tension in Amber between filmmaking, which is a necessarily collective activity, and photography which is a necessarily individual activity. The fact that Amber has always had to negotiate that... means you [have] to accommodate quite a strong degree of individualism.”
Perhaps the best-known work produced by Amber is by the Finnish-born photographer and founding member Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, in particular her on-going series of photographs and films recording the changing faces of the Byker district of Newcastle, from the terraced streets where she lived and worked from the late 1960s, to the demolition of much of the old housing to be replaced by the Byker Wall and other lower-rise flats designed by the architect Ralph Erskine. Her first book of photographs, and a film, Byker, released in 1983, show a close-knit, and largely white community, while her second book and film, Today I’m With You, released in 2010, mark the change to a multi-ethnic community and documents the stories of the many immigrants who now live there.
Among other projects by Konttinen for Amber is the film The Writing in the Sand, co-directed with Peter Roberts, that uses almost entirely still photographs from beaches on the north-east coast, shot by handheld camera and with a soundtrack edited from live recordings made at the beaches. The film won the Grand Prix at the Melbourne Film Festival in 1992. Konttinen's work is arguably some of the best documentary photography ever made (mostly) in the UK, and easily holds its own against the strongest international work.
Only in the past few years, however, have her photographs been taken up by the New York gallerist L. Parker Stephenson. “[Parker]'s great,” says Rigby. “She's really begun to develop an awareness of Sirkka’s work… Simon Baker [the Tate’s senior photography curator] has just bought 20 of the Byker shots.” However, he says, “Sirkka often will say that she could not have worked outside the context of the collective. She could not have sustained this work outside the context of the collective.”
Among the collective’s many films (including a number of dramatised pieces), are the collectively titled Tyne Documentaries, four short films that document a ship launch, a rope operated coal-railway originally constructed by railway pioneer George Stephenson, the reconstructed last-day of a brickworks and record of a day in the life of a glassworks, all featuring stunning cinematography and editing and either directed or co-directed by late Amber co-founder Murray Martin. “Amber is never knowingly ‘on-message’,” says Rigby.
“Its natural home is oppositional [and] obviously it’s of the left… [But it has] always been interested in ambiguity, it’s never been about pushing a political line.” Says Konttinen: “Our refusal to chase monies that are tied to other people's agendas has meant that at times we have been practically running on empty, but as we never borrow, we are never in dept and remain free to pursue our own goals.”