Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen (born 1948) is a Finnish photographer who has worked in Britain since the 1960s. [1] Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, [2] National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., [3] Tate [4] and the UK Memory of the World Register. [5]
Konttinen was born in Myllykoski, municipality of Sippola (from 1975 part of the town of Anjalankoski, from 2009 part of the town of Kouvola), Finland in 1948. Konttinen became interested in photography at the age of 12 and was a member of a photography group in a nearby town. Intending to pursue photography as a career, she was apprenticed to a fashion photographer in Helsinki for a year. [6] Konttinen studied photography in London in the 1960s, and cofounded the Amber collective, which moved to the northeast of England in 1969. [7]
From 1969 Konttinen lived in Byker, and for about a decade photographed and interviewed the residents of this area of terraced houses until her own house was demolished. [8] [9] [10] She continued to work there for some time afterwards. This resulted in the book Byker, [7] which in David Alan Mellor's words "bore witness to her intimate embeddedness in the locality". [11] In 1980 she became the first photographer since the Cultural Revolution to have her work exhibited by the British Council in China. [11]
Konttinen's next project was a study of girls attending dance schools in North Shields, their mothers, and the schools. The book Step by Step came from this. [7] The book was an influence for the film Billy Elliot . [12]
Three years of photographing the beach between Seaham and Hartlepool resulted in the series "Coal Coast". [13]
Konttinen later returned to Byker and photographed its new residents in colour. [14]
Konttinen's work is held in the following permanent collections:
I luv you Jimmy Spud is a play set in Newcastle upon Tyne by British playwright Lee Hall starring Gus Brown as Jimmy Spud and Michael Walpert as Stephen (Scout). Originally commissioned by BBC Radio 4, it was first broadcast in 1995.
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.
Kikuji Kawada is a Japanese photographer. He co-founded the Vivo photographic collective in 1959. Kawada's books include Chizu and The Last Cosmology (1995). He was included in the New Japanese Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1974 and was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Photographic Society of Japan in 2011.
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.
Christopher Horace Steele-Perkins is a British photographer and member of Magnum Photos, best known for his depictions of Africa, Afghanistan, England, Northern Ireland, and Japan.
Homer Warwick Sykes is a Canadian-born British documentary photographer whose career has included personal projects and landscape photography.
Susan Bright is a British writer and curator of photography, specializing in how photography is made, disseminated and interpreted. She has curated exhibitions internationally at institutions including: Tate Britain, National Portrait Gallery in London and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago amongst others.
Dewi Lewis is a Welsh publisher and curator of 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 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.
Colin Jones was an English ballet dancer-turned-photographer and prolific photojournalist of post-war Britain.
Neil Emile Elias Kenlock is a Jamaican-born photographer and media professional who has lived in London since the 1960s. During the 1960s and 1970s, Kenlock was the official photographer of the British Black Panthers, and he has been described as being "at the forefront of documenting the black experience in the UK". Kenlock was the co-founder of Choice FM, the first successful radio station granted a licence to cater for the black community in Britain.
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).
Side Gallery is a photography gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne, run by Amber Film & Photography Collective. It opened in 1977 as Side Gallery and Cinema with a remit to show humanist photography "both by and commissioned by the group along with work it found inspirational". It is the only venue in the UK dedicated to documentary photography. Side Gallery is located at Amber's base in Side, a street in Quayside, Newcastle near the Tyne Bridge.
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