#97 CAMERA Book Review: Tish Murtha - Elswick Kids

A look through the new and wonderful Newcastle based book Elswick Kids by the late Tish Murtha.

Tish Murtha's Elswick Kids was published posthumously by Bluecoat Press in 2018 and brings together photographs made in 1978 in the Elswick district of Newcastle upon Tyne, where Murtha grew up. Produced shortly after she returned from studying documentary photography at Newport College of Art under David Hurn, the series records the children of her own neighbourhood at a time when the North East was entering a period of industrial decline and rising unemployment. Although the photographs were not originally intended as a standalone exhibition or publication, they became the foundation of Murtha's documentary practice and led directly to her appointment as a Community Photographer with Side Gallery in Newcastle.

The photographs concentrate on the social world created by children within the streets of Elswick, documenting games, friendships and everyday interactions in the spaces between terraced houses, back lanes and local streets. Rather than presenting childhood as separate from its surroundings, Murtha shows how the physical environment shaped daily life, independence and community. Working within a neighbourhood she knew intimately, she photographed friends, relatives and local families with a familiarity that distinguishes the series from more detached forms of social documentary. Elswick Kids remains an important record of working class childhood in late twentieth century Britain and provides an essential starting point for understanding Murtha's later projects on youth unemployment and social inequality.

Hardcover: 180 pages
Publisher: The Bluecoat Press (1 Dec. 2018)
Language: English

Tish Murtha
Blue Coat Press

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