The opening film of this year’s Sheffield Doc Fest, Paul Sng’s brilliant and powerful Tish is an intimate portrait of British documentary photographer Tish Murtha. Tish who you may ask? And that’s kind of the point.
Born in 1956, the third of ten children, Tish Murtha grew up in relative poverty in the North East of England. She found her way into photography via a bit of luck (she discovered a camera in an abandoned house) and support via a lecturer on a photography course she took in Newcastle, who persuaded her to apply to a newly established Documentary Photography course in Newport, Wales.
When she returned to Newcastle after graduating, she began documenting the lives of her friends, family and the community around her. Her success in capturing the photographs that she did came from her intimate knowledge and true understanding of her subjects. This was no middle-class outsider coming to snap poverty porn in working class areas, but a woman who understood the true nature of poverty and social deprivation that she was capturing on film.
Sng (whose previous films include Poly Styrene: I am a Cliché) traces Tish’s story in conjunction with her eloquent daughter Ella, who interviews people who had encountered her feisty mother at various points in her life, including other family members, friends and people who taught or worked with her.
Whilst her story is told, Tish’s photographs are presented at certain points throughout the film, covering some of the photographer’s most important, and now highly respected, bodies of work such as her study of youth unemployment in the early eighties and her work in London’s Soho district documenting the lives of sex workers. Tish meticulously detailed her work in written commentaries to go alongside her photographs and sections of this prose, as well as letters, diaries and other notes, are voiced by Maxine Peak, who gives the artist a posthumous voice.
Through her text and her photographs, we see what drove Tish to keep working, even when she was struggling financially herself. She understood how important it was to document what was happening around her, particularly the way her community was suffering under Thatcher’s government in the early eighties when politicians were more concerned with destroying the unions than they were with helping communities move on positively from an industrial age of steel and coal. It’s her passion for social justice that resonates powerfully from the film, giving it a relevant edge in today’s cost-of-living crisis hit Britain.
It’s clear that Tish never really made much in the way of a living from her photography during her own lifetime. She never ‘escaped’ from her working class roots. Indeed, she never wanted to. In one part of the film she has a fall out with the Side Gallery in Newcastle, which had been showcasing her work, because of what she called their “poverty is beautiful, maaan” attitude and their apparent disrespect of her work. A particularly emotional moment captured in the film occurs when Ella describes the last few days of her mother’s life – terrified that she would suffer benefit sanctions. She died the day before she was due to turn 57 after suffering a brain aneurysm.
Alongside charting her mother’s life, the film also focusses on Ella’s mission to preserve her mother’s legacy. Throughout the film it’s clear that in her lifetime Tish’s photographs were not fully appreciated for their power and authenticity. There are now permanent displays of Tish’s work at the Tate, London and various hardback books published showcasing her work, thanks to the efforts of her daughter.
As an organ donor, Tish’s legacy also included saving four women and the eyesight of four men after her death, the film reveals. Her photographs will live on, and hopefully this film will go some way to ensure that Tish Murtha’s name lives on as well.
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