British history, left-wing politics, and second-wave feminism all converge in Paul Sng's illuminating, and at times infuriating, documentary about Northern English social documentary photographer Patricia "Tish" Murtha.
Sng collaborated with Tish's daughter, Ella Murtha, an archivist and editor who provided access to a stirring collection of mostly black-and-white photographs and conducted the film's touching on-camera interviews.
The format recalls Sng's 2021 profile of X-Ray Spex front woman Poly Styrene. Similarly, Sng worked with Poly's daughter, Celeste Bell, who had compiled a book about her mother and served as the on-screen narrator (Sng has also made films about Sleaford Mods and the UK's housing crisis). Sadly, both women–artists and single mothers–died before their time.
Tish's lifelong project was to document the lives of working class people, especially those of her native Newcastle upon Tyne. She imbued them with dignity simply by allowing them to be themselves. If her subjects are full of life, many photographs feature hardscrabble pubs, abandoned buildings, and broken-down cars--Thatcher's England in full effect
Speakers include four of Tish's nine siblings, Eileen, Glenn, Mark, and Carl (Glenn, an aspiring actor whose dreams never came to fruition, has since passed away). As kids, they would scavenge vacant properties, and that's how Tish found her first camera. Others, including School of Documentary Photography mentors and classmates, testify to her strength of character. "She was quite a firebrand," says one. "She was frightening," says another, neither description intended as criticism.
At times, her photographs flip by to the sounds of Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres’ subtle electronic score. At other times, Shameless actress Maxine Peake reads from Tish's writing about her subjects, including juvenile jazz bands and unemployed youth in Elswick and sex workers in London's Soho (Shin-Fei Chen plays Tish in brief recreations of her home life).
The documentary turns dark as Tish's financial situation becomes increasingly dire. Her trusty camera starts to malfunction, she ends up working in a meatpacking plant–though she was a vegetarian–and some weeks, she doesn’t have enough to eat.
In 2013, she suffered a brain aneurysm, ended up in the hospital, and appears to have died there at the age of 56 (the film is vague on the specifics). Since her death, prestigious museums have acquired her work and her daughter has published three collections of her photographs. If Tish had received more media attention and financial support sooner, she might have had an easier life, but it's hard to make a living as a photographer of working class lives as opposed to fashion photography, photojournalism, or celebrity portraiture--which have their own sets of challenges--and she refused to compromise.
Tish is a fine documentary about an empathetic artist who deserved to be better known, especially in her own country, not least because her work functions as part of a continuum with the kitchen sink dramas filmmakers like Tony Richardson and Ken Loach made in the 1960s. She came up in a more enlightened time, but Tish Murtha was still a woman, a mother, a non-Londoner, and a maker of still images, rather than moving pictures, and the world wasn’t quite ready for her yet.
Why should academic and public libraries add this Tish Murtha documentary to their collections?
Tish is both a personal and political story, making it a valuable addition to any library collection that highlights social justice, feminism, or British history. Public libraries will find it appealing to patrons interested in working-class representation, women artists, and under-recognized figures in photography. Academic libraries, meanwhile, will benefit from its dual focus on Murtha’s art and the political climate of Thatcher-era Britain, providing resources for discussions of class, politics, and gender in visual culture.
How can this Tish Murtha documentary support courses in photography, feminism, and British social history?
Tish works exceptionally well in classrooms. Photography and visual arts students can study her techniques and her radical choice to center dignity and authenticity in documenting working-class lives. In women’s and gender studies courses, her struggles as a working-class single mother and female artist provide a critical case study of systemic barriers in the arts. In British history and sociology classes, her photographs offer raw visual evidence of life in Thatcher’s England, making them invaluable for contextualizing the economic and political struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. This interdisciplinary usefulness makes the film an excellent teaching tool across multiple subjects.
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