British Culture Archive Presents: A Woman's Work - A Celebration of 20th Century Female Documentary Photography

“A Woman’s Work” is a touring exhibition that celebrates 20th-century female documentary photography.

Tish Murtha

Photographer Tish Murtha documented her home community of Elswick in the West End of Newcastle during the 1970s and 1980s. This period was characterised by significant social change, as mass de-industrialisation in the UK left many inner-city communities dealing with the social impact of job losses and lack of employment opportunities.

Tish Murtha’s images of those on the margins of society challenged and documented the inequalities faced by working-class communities. In equal measures, they celebrated what it means to be working-class. Being part of the community she was documenting, Tish Murtha’s work is among some of the most empathetic and powerful examples of social documentary photography of the 20th century.

Newcastle's West End

Tish Murtha, the third of ten children, grew up in the West End of Newcastle upon Tyne. While studying at Newcastle College of Higher Education, her lecturer persuaded her to study documentary photography at Newport College of Art, newly set up by Magnum photographer David Hurn.

During her interview, Hurn asked Murtha what she wanted to photograph. She replied, “I want to take pictures of policemen kicking children.” Hurn remarked that it was the shortest interview he had ever done. He understood what Murtha meant and knew she was going to be a social photographer.

This is the first time that Tish Murtha’s work is being exhibited in Manchester. The images displayed are some of the most powerful images of British social photography of the last fifty years.

Anne Worthington

Also on display is the work of photographer Anne Worthington.

Anne Worthington is a social documentary photographer and author from Blackpool, Lancashire. She produced an incredible body of work documenting the inner-city communities of East Manchester in the early 2000s before the area’s regeneration.

Anne said, “I took these photographs in Beswick, Clayton, and Openshaw, three areas of industrial East Manchester. These were areas that had employed thousands of people but had very little remaining. The streets housed a fraction of the people who used to live there. Like other parts of the UK, it’s a well-trodden story.”

Anne: “I met people down streets and on steps and became more known as the photographer. It could be a tough place, sometimes a dark place, but rarely unhappy. People had a sense of purpose. They saw something was not right and took it on. They’d been keeping their community going when other institutions had fallen away, and they knew how to have fun.”

East Manchester

“The collapse of industry made this area one of the poorest in the city. East Manchester ended up being earmarked for regeneration; by the time I started taking photographs here, streets in Beswick and Openshaw had emptied and were made ready for demolition. I would meet people living in the only house still occupied on otherwise empty streets while kids would take over those streets and smash walls or light fires in the empty houses.

I got to know a family who had started a club for young people to give them something else to do. They checked on the kids most nights, as some of them did not have stable places to call home and were still out late into the night. The family opened their home and gave them somewhere to stay.”