In 1976, Tish Murtha, the third of 10 children of Irish descent, left her native north-east to study photography at Newport College of Art in south Wales. She returned two years later to train her camera on the streets on which she had grown up. Murtha, who her daughter, Ella, recalls as “spiky haired, and in baseball boots”, took this photograph in 1980 on the council estate of Elswick in Newcastle, while she was on a job training scheme for the unemployed.
No bomb had recently fallen on Kenilworth Road in Elswick, but it might as well have done. In just over a year of Margaret Thatcher’s government, a million manufacturing jobs had been lost; the west end of Newcastle was among the places worst hit. When Murtha’s pictures first appeared, her MP used them in parliament as evidence of the disturbing reality of life for those who had left school with no hope of work. The girl on the upturned chair, apparently sinking beneath the smoky rubble of her life, is Karen Lafferty; her boyfriend at the time, “Robbo”, appears in other photographs in the series, including one in which he lies on the pavement, under graffiti reading “Cops Piss Off”.
Though she never stopped taking pictures, Murtha published no books of photography in her lifetime. Her daughter has been archiving her mother’s pictures since Tish died suddenly aged 57, five years ago. Ella used Kickstarter to fund a book of the Elswick images, Youth Unemployment, and a retrospective of her work will open at the Photographer’s Gallery next month. Her mum, she says, used to refer to the image reproduced here as “Saturday night out on the dole”.
Tish Murtha: Works 1976-1991, the Photographers’ Gallery, London W1, 15 June-14 October
