Archive News • Tish Murtha • November 2023
Photo: Tish Murtha © Ella Murtha, all rights reserved.
Tish Murtha remains one of the most important British documentary photographers of the late twentieth century, recognised for her photographs of working-class life in Newcastle and the North East during the 1970s and 1980s.
During her lifetime, Murtha’s work was supported through publicly funded documentary photography projects, exhibitions and commissions, helping establish her reputation within British social documentary photography.
Following Elswick Revisited, produced between 1987 and 1991, Murtha’s work remained respected within photography circles and public collections, but for many years it sat outside sustained wider public visibility.
Photo: Tish Murtha © Ella Murtha, all rights reserved.
Following Tish Murtha’s death in 2013, her daughter Ella Murtha made it her mission to protect her mother’s archive and ensure the work continued to be seen, understood and remembered as a vital part of Britain’s social documentary history.
Earlier publications also played an important role in bringing renewed attention to Murtha’s photography, making key bodies of work available to new audiences and helping build a foundation for the archive’s later recognition.
British Culture Archive first began working with the Tish Murtha Archive during this period of renewed public interest, presenting the photographs online through curated galleries, editorial features, print releases and sustained digital promotion to large audiences in the UK and internationally.
At a time when relatively little British social documentary photography was being platformed at scale online, BCA helped introduce Murtha’s work to new contemporary audiences through social media, publishing, print sales and long-term digital presentation.
As institutional and public interest in the archive continued to grow, Murtha’s photographs increasingly reached publishers, curators, filmmakers and cultural organisations engaging with British documentary photography and working-class social history.
That wider resurgence later contributed to the release of the BBC documentary Tish, directed by Paul Sng and produced by Modern Films, which introduced Murtha’s life and work to a significantly broader public audience.
BCA was involved in early conversations around the project and later worked with Modern Films and the BFI on Documenting Your Community, an open call launched to coincide with the release of Tish.
Inspired by Murtha’s work and wider social documentary photography in Britain, the project encouraged photographers to document everyday life and the communities around them.
Today, Tish Murtha’s work remains central to BCA’s publishing, print and archive programme, including the forthcoming publication Vandalism on a Grand Scale, produced in collaboration with the Tish Murtha Archive.
