TISH special screening and Q&A with Open Eye Gallery, film producer Jen Corcoran and socially engaged photographer Emma Case will be on 13 December, 6–8pm, at Picturehouse FACT. Book your tickets.

As I write here and now, in 2023, I witness the discussion of photography as a socio-political activist tool getting louder each day. Photography as a socially driven or socially engaged practice, however, is not new, and the film Tish is a timely reminder of this. 

Tish Murtha was born on 14 March 1956, one of ten children and brought up in a council house in Elswick in Newcastle. Her mother ensured all ten of her children had access to crayons, pencils and paper (despite not being able to afford these items) because she felt everyone had the right to be creative and to pursue a life in whatever they felt passionate about.

Tish was raised and later photographed people within the political context of ‘Thatcherism’. This era saw working-class communities suffer because of the Conservative government’s neoliberal economic policy resulting in de-industrialisation and the growth of global capitalism. As a result, the industries that had sustained the very communities that Tish had lived in, were decimated, seeing an increase in unemployment from 1.5 million to 2 million within the first year of the conservative party in power. 

Like many of her photographic peers at the time, she took what might be known as a social realist approach. Her work represented a genuine desire to capture an accurate record of the socio-economic situation a whole generation of disenfranchised people faced at the time. There appear, however, to be two distinct differences between her photography and some of her other photographic peers at the time. Firstly, the unshakable knowledge that Tish wasn’t simply documenting other people’s working-class lives; she was documenting the reality of her own life. Often photographing friends, family, and her own wider community – there is an intimacy and honesty in the work that an ‘outsider’ just could not capture. She did not shy away from the gritty reality of domestic and working environments she found herself and her community in. At the same time, however, she highlighted a playful resilience of childhood and pride in the working-class community despite the situation people found themselves in. She captured a beauty within the reality. 

That is not to say that some areas of community she was interested in (or in some cases from photography galleries) invited to document, weren’t difficult to tackle, or in Tish’s own words, ‘a tough one to crack’. From Soho night workers in London to racially diverse communities in Middlesborough, she would take the same approach to documenting people as those she photographed who lived down her street. She would invest time and energy in the individuals she met, building up trust and friendship over time and always with a view to listening first, photographing second. This was recognised in her practice and in her career securing commissions with respected organisations such as The Photographers Gallery. 

Despite the profiling of her work through these exhibitions, the second distinction is that her work was just not getting the same recognition as her male counterparts, but why? It certainly wasn’t for a lack of passion and drive from Tish to get her work seen, as ultimately, she knew the community she documented needed to be seen and heard. Her daughter Ella described how often her mother would live ‘hand to mouth’ and despite her ongoing commitment to her photography, she simply could not make a sustainable living from the work. The reality was that Tish found herself, time and time again, living and grappling with the governmental structures and policies around UK employment, just as those she was photographing experienced. As a single-parent mother raising Ella, her life in London was cut short by a need to move back up North as she simply could not afford to be there any longer. Tish’s story in many ways is a depressing reminder of the single parent penalty many mothers and single parents pay for trying to raise children and have a career. Throughout Tish’s working life and still now, in 2023, we find alarming stats in terms of women trying to succeed in the photographic industry. A huge proportion of students studying photography in education are women (around 80%), yet only around 15% of those working within the photographic sector are women. The maths it seems doesn’t add up. In the film, Ella describes the fire in her mother’s belly eventually being extinguished by the years of upward struggle, not only for her work to be valued properly by others, but just to even pay the bills. 

I would argue, however, that that fire in the belly does and will always live on. It lives in a generation of women who have nurtured creativity and passion in each other’s lives, like Tish’s mother did, and like Tish passed on to Ella by teaching her to fight for what she knew was right. Tish’s work speaks for itself in terms of both photographic talent and social justice, and her daughter Ella in her passion and commitment to put Tish’s work and name in the spotlight of the photographic world, where it undoubtedly belongs. The film is a true testament that this fire is well and truly lit – it is bright, beautiful and fierce. 

Text: Liz Wewiora