A moving new documentary about the late British photographer Tish Murtha raises important questions about class, creativity and politics.

Tish Murtha grew up in the impoverished Elswick area of Newcastle in the north of England. Born in 1956, she was one of ten children. Encouraged by her mother, she acquired a camera and began to document the community in which she was growing up. Many of the inhabitants of Elswick were unemployed, and many of the houses were abandoned or derelict. It was a dangerous neighbourhood, but carrying a camera seemed to afford Murtha a degree of safety. After studying at Newport College in Wales, she returned to the area. Early exhibitions – captured in three (currently very expensive) books – included projects entitled Elswick Kids, Youth Unemployment and Juvenile Jazz Bands, as well as a study of the struggle to save the nearby Scotswood engineering works.

In the early 1980s, Murtha moved to London and worked on a study of the commercial sex industry in Soho. However, she found it increasingly difficult to find commissions. While her work was included in various survey exhibitions, she fell back into poverty. Towards the end of her life, she struggled with the increasingly punitive requirements of the ‘benefits’ system, and often went without food. Tish Murtha eventually died of a brain aneurysm on the day before her 57^th birthday, in 2013.

Tish is a new documentary by director Paul Sng, currently (December 2023) in UK cinemas and streaming on Curzon Home Cinema. The film was initially developed through a Kickstarter funding campaign, and eventually supported through the National Lottery, via Screen Scotland, and the British Film Institute. In many respects, it’s a fairly conventional life history. We follow Murtha’s daughter Ella through a series of conversations, almost exclusively with people who knew Tish – her family, friends and teachers. This feels a little clunky at the start, but its very ordinariness reflects the film’s approach. Importantly, there are no artworld ‘experts’ or celebrities here: as in Murtha’s own photographs of her community, there is an unforced intimacy and warmth in all this that is rather different from the usual celebratory biopic.

There is no surviving video or audio of Murtha herself, although extracts from her diaries and essays are read by the wonderful Maxine Peake. In several interviews, Ella pulls out letters, college reports and contact sheets that give evidence of her mother’s life and work at the time. The film includes various photographic portraits of Murtha, and there are some reconstructions of her working in the darkroom, or simply making cups of tea – although these are all shot from behind. As a result – and despite the fact that this is ‘her’ film – Murtha herself remains a somewhat elusive, almost ghostly presence. However, one suspects this was what she might have wanted: it wasn’t all about her, but about the lives she documented.

Displayed on a large screen (I was lucky enough to see the film in the National Film Theatre in London), the photographs themselves are really quite phenomenal. One could wax lyrical about the aesthetic composition and the texture of these images; but their crucial quality is the intimacy she manages to achieve with her subjects – and particularly with children and young people. (I haven’t been able to secure permission to ‘quote’ any of these images here, but you can find some selections via this website, run by her daughter; and via the British Culture Archive, which has been tweeting Murtha’s images fairly regularly for some time now.)

Of course, there is a politics to all this. Murtha was a socialist and a feminist, and this is reflected in some of the subjects she chose: the images of unemployed young people, and of the struggle of the Scotswood workers, are powerful campaigning material. Her unglamorous photographs of the ‘jazz bands’ (which were in fact marching bands) expose the rather pathetic militarism of the whole enterprise; while her images of London sex workers possess an empathy that is the very opposite of voyeurism. At her college interview, when asked what kinds of photographs she would like to take, Murtha reportedly replied ‘I want to photograph a policeman kicking kids’. As numerous participants in the film suggest, she was fiercely committed to working-class struggle, and uncompromising in her views: she was not a person you would want to mess with.

Some of her work has a lasting documentary value. The images of unemployed youth being forced to take demeaning jobs as part of the government’s Youth Opportunities Scheme (‘the children of serfdom’, she called them), or of the older workers made redundant by the closure of the BAE works at Scotswood, attest to the human effects of Britain’s post-industrial decline – issues that have a lasting relevance to our current age of ‘austerity’. And Tish accentuates all this by including footage of Margaret Thatcher and then Tony Blair at their most excruciating and self-righteous.

Yet Murtha’s relationships with her subjects were also political. She would not have been able to capture the images she did without spending a good deal of time with these people, and ultimately being one of them. Throughout the history of photography, one can trace a kind of ‘class tourism’: even for the best of humanitarian reasons, we find countless middle-class photographers taking photographs of poor working-class subjects, as though they were some kind of picturesque exotic species. Murtha didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a ‘community photographer’, an approach she felt was often the preserve of ‘middle-class trendies’: she fell out with one of her early sponsors, Newcastle’s Side Gallery, because she refused to conform to the expectation that she should show that ‘working-class poverty is beautiful’. She aimed to record, and to validate, working-class lives, but to do so without condescension or sentimentality.

This is especially apparent in her images of children and young people. All too often, images of children fall into the trap of cuteness; or, when it comes to children in poverty, of inviting charitable pity. By contrast, Murtha’s photographs have an authenticity, a tenderness, and a kind of respect for children – a refusal to patronise – that is all too rare. Many of these images are positively joyful.

Tish celebrates these qualities, but it also tells a tragic personal story. The film covers most of her early projects in great detail, but after her move to London and the birth of her daughter, it gives us rather less to go on. She moved back north in 1987, and her photography became more intermittent: one painful moment shows her attempt to revive her career with an application to the Arts Council for a project that would ‘celebrate the community’ in which she was then living, in Middlesborough. A caption on a black screen simply notes that her application was rejected. Professional photography was (and arguably still is) a male-dominated world, which was incompatible with being a parent. The film’s account of her final days, when she was living hand-to-mouth and being sent by the benefits office to look for low-paid work in catering, is quite harrowing. The film’s air of melancholy is accentuated by the incidental music, and the snatches of romantic opera – which, perhaps unexpectedly, was Murtha’s favourite genre.

As a working-class woman, and a fairly uncompromising one, Murtha clearly didn’t play the games of the official art world, nor did she want to. We’re very familiar with the ‘rags to riches’ stories of some of the working-class British artists, writers and musicians of the 1960s and 1970s; but we know much less about the legions of those who failed to achieve approval and celebrity. If anything, the world of the so-called creative industries is much more elitist and exclusive now than it was at that time; and the Tish Murthas of today would probably face even greater obstacles – not least in getting funding for training  in the first place. (On which topic, see this book.)

It’s particularly sad that the real quality and uniqueness of Murtha’s work has only really been discovered posthumously. In the ten years since her death, she has featured in several high-profile exhibitions; and the film shows her daughter visiting a display of her photographs that is now part of the Tate Britain’s permanent collection. While the work she produced is gradually being rediscovered, the waste of her talent – and probably of many like her – is nevertheless depressing.

Tish is a film that raises some key questions that are still very relevant – about class and creativity and representation, and ultimately about the politics of culture. Catch it where you can. 

NOTE: Off the back of the film, the British Culture Archive is running a photography project entitled ‘Documenting Your Community’, which invites participants to submit images of their local communities. Details here.