If you saw a cutout of this girl, jumping for what looks like joy in her smart shoes and A-line dress, you might imagine her in a park or at the beach – a vision of childhood innocence untroubled by external circumstances. But the backdrop tells a different story. The photograph, by Tish Murtha, was taken in April 1978 in the back lane of Kenilworth Road in Elswick, a neighbourhood of Newcastle. The austere buildings, the rubbish on the ground, the almost comically beaten-up car to which the girl is adding even more dents – all paint a picture of deprivation that will only get worse when Margaret Thatcher becomes prime minister the following year.
Often photographs like this are taken by outsiders who make a study of poverty and marginalised communities. But Murtha was no stranger to this scene. She was born in South Shields, the third of 10 children, and grew up on Kenilworth Road, playing among abandoned cars and derelict buildings as a child. She disliked how poverty could be turned into a spectacle by middle-class documentarians, and returning from her photography degree in south Wales in 1978, she made it her life’s mission to tell the story of this community from the inside.
Murtha’s photographs had an effect at the time – her MP displayed her series on youth unemployment in parliament – but it was only after she died in 2013 that her work was given due attention. It was never just deprivation that she portrayed in her pictures. As a new joint exhibition at the Baltic in Gateshead shows, there was also humour, defiance and resilience, often expressed through the faces and body language of children.
There are other details worth noticing here. Murtha’s daughter Ella, who manages her mother’s archive, tells me the graffiti on the wall is a nod to former Newcastle United footballer Malcolm MacDonald – something that Sam Fender liked when he chose this image for the cover of his and Olivia Dean’s hit single Rein Me In. “He told me that my mam’s photos were like snapshots of his imagined dreams of Newcastle in the 1970s and 80s,” says Ella, “and they were exactly how his dad had described growing up.”
Photograph by Tish Murtha