Former name | Side Gallery and Cinema |
---|---|
Established | 1977 |
Location | 5-9 Side, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 3JE |
Type | Registered charity |
Collections | "an extensive documentary record of the region" [1] |
Collection size | 20,000 photographs; 10,000 slides; 100 films; 6TB digital assets |
Founder | Murray Martin, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Graham Smith, plus Graham Denman, Peter Roberts and Lorna Powers |
Curator | Kerry Lowes |
Owner | Amber Film & Photography Collective |
Website | amber-online |
Side Gallery is a photography gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne, run by Amber Film & Photography Collective. [2] It opened in 1977 as Side Gallery and Cinema [3] with a remit to show humanist photography "both by and commissioned by the group along with work it found inspirational". [4] [5] It is the only venue in the UK dedicated to documentary photography. [6] [7] Side Gallery is located at Amber's base in Side, a street in Quayside, Newcastle near the Tyne Bridge. [3]
Side Gallery closed on 9 April 2023 after the loss of its Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation status and funding in November 2022, combined with rising energy bills. [8] It launched a fundraising campaign which closed on 30 May 2023 to help it work towards reopening in 2024. [9]
The inaugural exhibition was titled Documents in the North East and showed the work of four documentary photographers: Robert Hamilton Carling, James Henry Cleet, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Graham Smith. [10]
In 1978, Henri Cartier-Bresson had a retrospective exhibition at Side. [6]
In 2015 the gallery closed for a year and a half for major redevelopment, reopening in September 2016. [6] A second exhibition space was added, as well as a library, and study centre / social space with digital access to the collection. [11] [12] [13]
Side Gallery closed on 9 April 2023 after a reduction in Arts Council England funding, combined with rising energy bills. It launched a fundraising campaign to raise £60,000 so it could work towards reopening in 2024. [14] [15]
The gallery's collection includes "an extensive documentary record of the region" [1] as well as work by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, [19] Russell Lee, Lewis Hine, [1] and Susan Meiselas. [1] Some of the gallery's exhibitions that are held in its collection include Tish Murtha's Juvenile Jazz Bands (1979), Konttinen's Step by Step (1984), Dean Chapman's Shifting Ground (2001) and Karen Robinson's All Dressed Up (2005). [6]
Josef Koudelka is a Czech-French photographer. He is a member of Magnum Photos and has won awards such as the Prix Nadar (1978), a Grand Prix National de la Photographie (1989), a Grand Prix Henri Cartier-Bresson (1991), and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (1992). Exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography, New York; the Hayward Gallery, London; the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
Terence Patrick O'Neill was a British photographer, known for documenting the fashions, styles, and celebrities of the 1960s. O'Neill's photographs capture his subjects candidly or in unconventional settings.
Byker is a district in the east of the city and metropolitan borough of Newcastle upon Tyne, in the county of Tyne and Wear, England. Home to the Byker Wall estate, made famous by TV series Byker Grove, Byker's population was recorded at 12,206 in the 2011 census. Byker is bordered by Heaton to the north and by Shieldfield to the north east. Until 1974 it was in Northumberland.
Christopher David Killip was a Manx photographer who worked at Harvard University from 1991 to 2017, as a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies. Killip is known for his black and white images of people and places especially of Tyneside during the 1980s.
Graham Smith is a photographer from Middlesbrough, England, who was particularly active in photographing Middlesbrough and the north-east of England in the 1970s and 1980s. Smith curtailed his career as a photographer in 1990, since when he has been a professional woodworker.
Markéta Luskačová is a Czech photographer known for her series of photographs taken in Slovakia, Britain and elsewhere. Considered one of the best Czech social photographers to date, since the 1990s she has photographed children in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and also Poland.
Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen is a Finnish photographer who has worked in Britain since the 1960s. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Tate and the UK Memory of the World Register.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize is awarded annually by the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and the Photographers' Gallery to a photographer who has made the most significant contribution to the photographic medium in Europe during the past year.
Homer Warwick Sykes is a Canadian-born British documentary photographer whose career has included personal projects and landscape photography.
Gordon MacDonald works with photography as an artist, writer, curator, press photographer and educator.
Ken Grant is a photographer who since the 1980s has concentrated on working class life in the Liverpool area. He is a lecturer in the MFA photography course at the University of Ulster.
Café Royal Books is an independent publisher of photography photobooks or zines, run by Craig Atkinson and based in Ainsdale, Southport, England. Café Royal Books produces small-run publications predominantly documenting social and cultural change, Including themes of youth, leisure, music, protest, race, religion, industry, identity, architecture and fashion, often in Britain and Ireland, using both new work and photographs from archives. Café Royal Books has been operating since 2005 and has published over 950 books and zines.
Amber Film & Photography Collective is a film and photography collective based in Newcastle upon Tyne with an aim to capture working-class life in North East England. Often combining professional and non-professional actors, Amber has produced several documentary and feature films of varying lengths, sometimes blending documentary with fiction. Their productions have included Seacoal and Eden Valley, along with a drama-documentary about 1960s Newcastle City Council leader, T. Dan Smith.
Patricia Anne "Tish" Murtha was a British social documentary photographer best known for documenting marginalised communities, social realism and working class life in Newcastle upon Tyne and the North East of England.
Open Eye Gallery is a photography gallery and archive in Liverpool, UK that was established in 1977. It is housed in a purpose-built building on the waterfront at Mann Island, its fourth location.
Murray Martin was a British documentary and docudrama filmmaker. He was a founding and lifelong member of Amber Film & Photography Collective, with whom he made many films including Seacoal (1985), In Fading Light (1989) and Eden Valley (1994).
Alys Tomlinson is a British photographer. She has published the books Following Broadway (2013), Ex-Voto (2019), Lost Summer (2020) and Gli Isolani (2022). For Ex-Voto she won the Photographer of the Year award at the 2018 Sony World Photography Awards. Portraits from Lost Summer won First prize in the 2020 Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize.
Syd Shelton is a British photographer, living in Hooe, who documented the Rock Against Racism movement. His work is held in the collections of Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.
Mik Critchlow was a British social documentary and portrait photographer who made work about North East England, in particular about his home town of Ashington. A book of this work was published in 2019 and he had a solo exhibition at Woodhorn museum in 2021/22. Critchlow's work is held in the collection of Amber Film & Photography Collective.
David Moore is a British photographer, artist and educator working in and around documentary photography. He has had solo exhibitions of his work at The Photographers' Gallery, London, Impressions Gallery, Bradford and at Wolverhampton Art Gallery. His work is held in the collection of the University of Warwick. He is Principal Lecturer for Documentary Photography and Photojournalism at the University of Westminster, London.