About Us
Amber History - 1989 to the Present
Funding Cuts & Community Touring
Give My Regards to Elizabeth, Peter Bialobrzeski
Social realist documentary photography has always enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the arts, but in the political and cultural context of the late 1980s it was being dismissed out of hand. In 1989 Side Gallery received an 80% funding reduction. The group switched its energy to community touring and the gallery itself was closed for a year. Across the North East of England, there were thirty six venues in which work was regularly exhibited.
Having completed its five year North Shields ‘residency’, Amber then began a conscious engagement with County Durham, again building on the contacts it had developed in earlier work. A significant burst of production developed around a series of international photography workshops, the first of which was held in the Durham town of Crook. Focusing around an exploratory theme of the Unclear Family it was followed by similar events in Northern France, the Ruhr and the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia. Photographers including Jindrich Streit, Peter Bialobrzeski, Miriam Reik, Stefan Dolfen and Dana Kyndrova were involved, all bringing their own work to the Collection, some later developing larger projects out of their engagement with the coalfield.
People of the Hills
People of the Hills, Richard Grassick
In its arguments with funders, Side proposed a model of work based on the idea of photographer/activists. This was rejected, but it formed the drive for all the activity, primarily co-ordinated by Richard Grassick. His own long term project in Durham’s upper dales, People of the Hills, dates from this period. It was impossible to sustain touring or commissions in the 1990s, however, and the gallery was re-opened on a smaller scale with a second hand bookshop providing front of house. A reduced photographic operation was supported out of the margins of the film budgets.
Eden Valley
Eden Valley, 1994
The first of the Durham feature films, Eden Valley (1994), was the last film produced within the Channel 4 franchise. Kitty having left, it was decided not to employ a writer, and Murray put the script together out of group discussions and research, a move which led the group towards greater collective engagement with the writing process. It explores the world of the harness racing fraternity and drew on contacts that had been made during the making of Seacoal. In its customary way, Amber bought trotting horses and land for grazing, training and a location caravan. Through the continuing interest of both Murray and Ellie, a horse still races under Amber colours at meetings of the UK Standardbred Racing Association, an organization Murray helped to set up and continues to support.
Beginning the Coalfield Trilogy
The Scar, 1997
In the aftermath of East Durham’s final coalfield closures, Amber began to focus on the area’s post-industrial experience. The first of these productions was It’s the Pits (1995), a video exploring young people’s lives. The next, working with women who had been involved in the miners’ support groups and were now having to pick up the pieces of the strike’s failure, was the feature film, The Scar (1997), for which Lorna took on the scripting role. Many of the women appear as themselves in the film, but the lead was taken by the actress Charlie Hardwick. Much of the film’s territory was made possible by the unusual degree of access offered by the manager of an opencast mining site.
Amber had developed workplace reconstructions (High Row and Last Shift) and had often drawn local non-professionals into acting roles. T Dan Smith had collaborated to provide the documentary interviews that the 1987 film exploited. Roles were sometimes closely modeled on the real lives of people with whom the group collaborated, but the blurring of documentary and fiction was pushed a little further in Like Father (2001). Shifting to men’s experiences and the landscapes of regeneration, the film drew on a campaign to save some allotment gardens (territory that has engaged Amber since the early 1970s) and on the personal story of ex-miner and musician Joe Armstrong. Playing a version of himself, he took the lead role in the resulting fictional narrative, the collective script for which was again drawn together by Lorna before she retired from the group.
Like Father, 2001
The Scar and Like Father received significant BBC budgets, enabling Amber to survive the death of Channel 4's Workshop franchises and the collapse of revenue support for regional film-making. Community engagement was not a priority for the emerging film funding models and it was hard to maintain the level and range of work of the 1980s.
Reviving the Gallery
Standstill funding throughout the 1990s left the gallery programme a severely reduced affair. The situation for photographic production was no better. By 1998, there was a clear choice: either close the gallery or invest in a new strategy for its revival. A group was convened: Murray, Sirkka and Richard, joined by Peter Fryer and Dean Chapman, who had recently brought his work on the Karenni insurgency in Burma to Side, as well as Graeme Rigby, a writer who had developed texts for Chris Killip, John Davies, and Peter Fryer exhibitions in the 1980s and 1990s, and for Side’s large scale 1995 retrospective tour Unremembered Lives. Graeme was subsequently invited to take on the role of propagandist.
Although the decision for renewal was initiated without support or encouragement, a shift in attitudes was beginning to take place. The certainty with which the territory had been dismissed ten years earlier, no longer seemed absolutely sustainable. There was an increasing awareness of the importance of the Side Collection. The success of the 1970s campaign to save Newcastle’s Quayside meant that the gallery was now centrally situated in an area designated for the encouragement of cultural tourism. Reviving the the exhibition programme involved a leap of faith, but an increase in support did follow in its wake. When the opportunity came, the gallery was re-opened on both floors.
Coalfield Stories
Fathers, Peter Fryer
The gallery group’s simultaneous decision to revive photographic production led to Coalfield Stories, a documentation of Durham’s post-industrial experience, which grew directly out of Like Father. The territory was rich. There were shared histories of engagement, a network of contacts and a strong sense of locations. There was also an enthusiasm for the idea that geographical focus would enhance the debate on new possibilities explored by individual bodies of work. Sirkka’s Coal Coast landscapes began from a portrait project in Easington allotments, the demolition of which was recorded in the film. Peter Fryer developed Fathers, working with two single parents who had been involved with Amber since the making of It’s the Pits. Looking at how people had reconstructed their lives, in Post Industrial Richard followed four ex-miners, one of whom was Joe Armstrong, and Dean began Shifting Ground, an exploration of change in South West Durham.
Horden Victory Club, Martin Figura
New regional lottery funding guidelines came out, full of words such as Coalfield, Community and Participation. It was possible to extend the core projects and involve more photographers. Martin Figura created a series of portraits around the leek show at Horden Victory Club. Chris Steele-Perkins began Hinterland, an exploration of animal cultures. Sally-Ann Norman examined housing in Farewell Squalor. In Signs of Coal, John Davies returned to the sites of his 1983 exhibition. Simon Norfolk examined the landscapes of abandonment and regeneration in Goaf. Karen Robinson developed All Dressed Up with teenage girls in East Durham. After Fathers, Peter Fryer began two bodies of work, one with refugees, increasingly directed to surplus housing in urban Tyneside, the other resulting in The Arab Boarding House, with the Yemeni community which had originally come to the coal port of South Shields in the C19th.
The Lottery & Digitisation
Coal Coast, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen
The Lottery's New Opportunities Fund supported digitising the archive, which became The Side Photographic Collection Online, launched in 2003. The widespread lottery bonanza had already enabled a switch to digital film editing, and digital techniques were spreading across the Amber operation. A negative scanner was acquired for digitisation and digital colour printing which allowed subtlety and naturalism, unachievable in a chemical darkroom, that Sirkka needed for the Coal Coast landscapes. She then exploited them in her subsequent return, after twenty years, to photograph the new Byker.
Shooting Magpies
Shooting Magpies, 2005
Just as the regeneration of photographic production grew out of Like Father, so Shooting Magpies (2005) grew out of the range of narratives, territories and ideas that emerged from Coalfield Stories. With its initial development supported by Channel 4, production became entangled in the extended restructuring of the broadcaster’s film departments. The decision to make a feature on digital video came primarily out of the need to reclaim some kind of independence and control.
Amber’s new digital video cameras were being used in the research for the new film and partly due to the quality of the material, the group became interested in pushing experiment further, incorporating it directly in a drama that is both structured and improvised. Working, out of necessity, with a very small team, the film was able to be developed on the hoof, using available light and next to no location budget. DV takes cost pressures off improvisation and experiment, and just as word processing facilitates collective engagement with script development, digital editing allows wider access to the final structure of a film.
Graeme, having joined the film-making group, took on the script development role. The fictional narrative of Shooting Magpies was constructed around two individuals; Emma Dowson, who had been involved in a Coalfield Stories project with a group of teenage mothers, leading to the video, We Did It Together – So Why Do I Feel So Alone? (2004) and Barry Gough, who as a youth worker had first helped Amber with the making of It’s the Pits and had been one of the subjects of Peter Fryer’s Fathers.
Northern Rock Foundation
Shooting Magpies, 2005
Production spread over a two year period as Amber continued to put a budget together. At the end of 2003, however, Northern Rock Foundation, which was already supporting Coalfield Stories, generously responded to a proposal for five year revenue film funding, making it possible to finish Shooting Magpies and begin to rebuild an approach to the work that had not been possible since the demise of the Channel 4 Film Workshop franchise.
The Long View
The Arab Boarding House, Peter Fryer
Playing with a reference to the 1947 film, Cartier-Bresson inscribed the gift of one of his photographs,"Amber Forever!". At a time when Murray was being asked if he would head up another venture, Sirkka knitted him a jumper incorporating the slogan. Amber is a commitment rather than a job. The survival of a film and photography collective for so long is the subject of wonder within the group and without.
The craft base is as important as the readiness to accommodate and encourage changing roles. Annie Robson who joined as an administrator in the 1990s, acquired accountancy skills to take on some of the work Lorna had been involved in, whilst also contributing the occasional voiceover. Graeme came as a writer, but was rapidly promoted to sound man. Peter Scott came to help with the welter of digitisation for the Side Photographic Collection Online, before assuming exhibition and archive responsibilities in 2004. Kerry Lowes, who was invited to join him run the gallery, had regularly visited Side since her teens, originally through contact with Barry Gough. She had researched the Side operation as part of an MA in Museum & Gallery Studies. She also brought design skills that were soon being used by the filmmakers.
Reviving the Cinema, Taking Over the Café
Amber and the Side Café Team, October 2006
Side Cinema was made fully accessible in 2000, and a number of independent groups came together to redevelop programming between 2003 and 2005, when they began work on their own cinema, Star & Shadow. Amber began to rebuild its own cinema programming during this period, and in 2005 the group took over the running of Side Café, which shares the same part of the complex as the cinema. The café had originally opened in the late 1990s, converting space that had housed Live Theatre and Newcastle Bookshop at different points in its history. The first half of 2006 saw Amber members turning in shifts in the kitchen to keep things going, Murray achieving a reputation as the King of Breakfasts, and Ellie’s soups and stews achieving considerable popularity. They met Nicole Walshaw at Vancouver International Film Festival, while showing Shooting Magpies and she was invited to join the group to run the café. A work permit was finally secured and she arrived in July 2006. A fully operational café, open 7.30am to 9pm, six days a week, was launched in November.
Washing Up: the Egalitarian Approach
Critics have often expressed frustration at Amber’s decision not to separate production team credits in their films, but it genuinely reflects the way the group works: the individual craft bases are important and are respected, but everyone contributes across the board and any attempt at exact demarcation would present a distorted picture. Similarly, everyone takes a responsibility for what is referred to as ‘the washing up’ (as opposed to the café washing up, or even the workshop’s actual washing up, for which only sporadic responsibility is assumed), which is broadly speaking, everything not directly involved in ‘production, publication and distribution.’
Creatively, the principle of an equal voice has always been important. The equal wage comes from the recognition of equal validity in all functions. The scale of the operation in the 1980s put severe strain on the ability to function as an integrated collective, and there is a general sense of a practical optimum somewhere around the current level.
Integration & Engagement
2004 saw a renewed commitment to an integrated practice, that has always been challenged, externally by the separation of funding sources and internally by the differing requirements of film and photography. A process of restructuring was initiated, aimed at securing a long term future for Amber’s concerned engagement with the North of England and the unique living archive that has grown out of it.
Back in the early 1970s, the introduction to The River Project quoted from RG Collingwood’s Principles of Art (Oxford, 1938). A cultural theorist with little time for film or photography, his simple point nevertheless remains relevant to the group’s work: The artist must talk of the problems of the community he serves, not his own, because they are interested in their own dilemmas, not those of the artist.