March is Women’s History Month. A suitable time to celebrate Tish Murtha. March also marks the eleventh anniversary of her death. March 2024 would have seen her celebrate her 68th birthday. She ought to have lived to see it, and see many more to come. She ought to have been afforded the opportunity to work in her chosen field of documentary photography, displaying her skills and talent to an admiring and appreciative world. But she didn’t, because the British establishment hate the working class and the arts, and they especially hate it when the working class become involved in the arts.
Last year saw the release of Tish, Paul Sng’s documentary film on the life of Murtha and, after a well-received cinematic run in the UK, it is now available to stream on Amazon. “It’s like she was born with a silver camera in her hand” jokes one of the talking heads in Sng’s film. And to be honest, it really is. Tish Murtha, born into a family of ten on a council estate in Elswick, Newcastle in 1956, was encouraged from a young age to be creative. Developing a fascination for photography, she began to capture her surroundings with authenticity, knowing full well that what she was shooting was her own life. Tish Murtha was no outsider; she belonged to the communities she documented, and recorded the devastating impact Thatcher’s neoliberal economic policies had upon them in the 1980s. It was arguably the bond and immutability between the artist and her work that ultimately meant that the recognition she was due often proved elusive.
Tish is a deeply personal film. Presented by her daughter Ella, whose championing of her late mother’s legacy is tenacious and admirable and who is shown to piece together her mother’s life via her work and testimonies from colleagues, friends and family. The film follows a similar template to Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché, Sng’s 2021 documentary on the eponymous X-Ray Spex front woman seen through the eyes of her daughter Celeste Bell, but it works far better in my opinion than that movie. During the course of the film, Ella refers to a sobering statistic that she has read which states that 80% of students studying photography are women, yet only 15% of women go on to actually make a living from photography. It would appear then that women receive less opportunities and recognition than their male contemporaries, and when you then consider the fact that Murtha was not only a woman, she was also a politically attuned, working-class northern woman with fire in her belly, then it seemingly reduced her chances greatly.
This is, to my mind, an inherent and all too common problem that many working class northern women face when working within the creative industries; as seen recently in Carol Morley’s 2023 film Typist Artist Pirate King, the inventive biopic of the neglected Sunderland-born artist Audrey Amiss, and in the experiences of A Taste of Honey playwright Shelagh Delaney and, most specifically, Rita, Sue and Bob Too writer Andrea Dunbar. Indeed, the film highlights Tish’s letters (narrated by Maxine Peake with a soft Tyneside burr) in which she complains about the condescending “cliques” who monopolised Newcastle’s Side Gallery and whose contrasting attitude towards her work was that “poverty is beautiful, maaan”, an offensively hippie stance of a group who enjoyed enough privilege to ensure that photographs were the closest they actually had to come to real poverty. This put me in mind of how theatre and film professionals would patronise Dunbar, treating her as their pet whose insight into the working class was valuable for them to mine, but was in turn used against her by them as they overruled her and made decisions which they believed were beyond her grasp as a working class woman from the north.
It should be a surprise, indeed a shock, that Arts Council England did not entertain Tish’s proposals in later years – it should be, but it sadly isn’t. As is all too often the case, such bodies have their favourites and flavours of the month and monopolise those in favour of individuals with real talent and/or a desire to break new ground. Ultimately, as the doors of opportunity closed on her, Tish Murtha found herself a victim of a poverty no one could ever term beautiful; forced between the choice of heating or eating, she found herself applying for unsuitable, menial jobs to ensure that she would not be sanctioned by the DWP and lose her benefits. She died of a brain aneurysm on 13th March, 2013, one day before her 57th birthday.
Tish Murtha’s work lives on, and not just because it is now preserved at the Tate for all to see. It lives on because it captures a truth and reality that genuinely touches people. Indeed, so many remark to Ella here that the subjects in her mother’s photos could have been them, that she had somehow captured exactly how they lived. And it lives on because Tish Murtha understood the world around her far better than most, in ways that are still incredibly relevant.
There’s a sequence in which Peake narrates her writing on youth unemployment from May 1980. It’s an entry based specifically on the disenfranchisement she saw firsthand with her brother Carl, whose ambition it was to be an actor, but who was instead destined for a series of unfulfilling and punishing menial jobs. Her writing condemns how the class and education system has no other design for working class communities than a cheap and disposable source of manual labour. She eloquently pinpoints the failings of neoliberalism with a devastating and prescient clarity; arguing that if the Labour politicians and trade unions continue to offer platitudes instead of solutions, they run the risk of disenfranchising generations of working class men and women. It’s a lesson that they refused to learn when Tony Blair’s New Labour came to power, a lesson that brought us the protest vote of Brexit and its knock-on effect within ‘red wall’ communities in the 2019 general election, and it is a lesson that Keir Starmer continues to ignore to this very day as we head towards another election later this year.
Find out more about the documentary here.
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