TISH, the reportedly remarkable and gripping documentary on the great but almost forgotten – where have we come across that combination of words before? – photographer Tish Murtha has been on limited release in festivals, cinemas and a couple of online narrowcasters but the BBC broadcast it on 1 April 2024 at 9pm UK time.
After that, we hope, it may be more widely available and we might finally get to see it too.
British documentary photographer Marc Davenant wrote this about TISH:
“Every gatekeeper in every museum and gallery across the country should be required to watch this documentary. It’s an object lesson in how working class talent is sidelined and ignored by the photography establishment and it made me very angry to be honest. Watch it.”
@marcdavenant at X formerly Twitter
Meanwhile I have added some links to interviews and reviews below.
Ever since coming across mention of Tish Murtha aka “The Demon Snapper” by her daughter Ella on Twitter and watching how she has so valiantly brought the British art world’s attention to her mother’s brilliant social documentary photography I’ve been hoping that someone would make a documentary about her and the underlying issues.
Now they have and Paul Sng is that documentary director and Tish is being proclaimed as “one of the best British films of 2023 – both a heartfelt tribute to the life and work of the late photographer Tish (born Patricia) Murtha and a timely reminder of the war waged on the nation’s industrial working-class by the Thatcher government and its successors. Murtha’s death in 2013 was not unrelated to that war.”
‘Tish review – haunting portrait of a driven working class photographer’, theartsdesk.com, 17 November 2023.
“… The subtext of the film is the political fear aroused by her agitational agenda and the resentment of some of her arty middle-class contemporaries. One letter Murtha wrote reported dark-room sabotage of her undeveloped photos by a gallerist’s girlfriend. She ended up as marginalised as she had been in childhood. Peake reads another letter wrote late in life in a humble, desperate voice seeking any kind of employment. A vegetarian, she was sent by an agency to work at a meat-processing factory. She was living on the breadline when she died of an aneurysm the day before her 57th birthday in 2013.
Had Murtha lived, she would have seen her photos exhibited at Tate Britain – which brought comfort and pride to Ella – and her legacy growing in the Brexit years of food banks and increasing class polarisation. A major artist, perhaps the most gifted and compassionate chronicler of inequality and oppression in British photography of the last half-century, she isn’t going away.”
Commentary
Tish is currently on show throughout the United Kingdom accompanied by Q+A sessions with director Paul Sng, and from the reviews I’ve seen so far it is a must-see documentary on one of the finest British photographers of the last century.
Tish Murtha was given the label “The Demon Snapper” by a Newcastle newspaper for her photographs of a peculiar pastime of the North-Eastern region, Juvenile Jazz Bands, which she displayed side-by-side with photographs of the working-class children who’d been rejected from membership of them.
Dr Simon Howard, a North-Eastern medical consultant, has written this about “The Demon Snapper”:
“The controversy stemmed from Murtha’s 1970s work documenting ‘Juvenile Jazz Bands’—groups of children dressed up in military uniforms and parading through the streets playing marching anthems on kazoos and glockenspiels, as a sort of weird tribute to colliery brass bands.
Murtha thought these groups, and in particular their militaristic associations, were harmful. As she said at the time,
a child must put aside all normal behaviour, and become the plaything of the failed soldier, the ex-armed forces members and their ilk; any spark of individuality is crushed by the military training imposed, until the child’s actions resemble those of a mechanical tin soldier, acting out the confused fantasies of an older generation.
Murtha’s photographic contribution to the debate was to create an exhibition juxtaposing her pictures of the uniformed bands with other shots of backstreet kids rejected from the bands imitating them….
From a modern perspective, it’s hard to argue with Murtha’s position, but it caused enormous controversy at the time….”
In her intake interview Tish Murtha told this to Magnum photojournalist David Hurn when he asked her why she wanted to photograph:
“I want to take pictures of policemen kicking children.”
Hurn immediately accepted Tish into the School of Documentary Photography at the Newport College of Art: the year was 1976, she was 20 and she graduated in 1978.
I visited the now-legendary photography school in 1984 after having worked with one of its teachers, Ron McCormick, when he had a special visiting fellowship at the Western Australian university art school I had attended then taught at through the latter part of the 1970s into the 1980s.
Until researching for this article I knew little about the Newport College of Art and the University of Wales, Newport other than what I had been shown by Ron McCormick.
Ron was often off photographing in the wilds of Western Australia during his fellowship and he told me almost nothing about the British documentary photography and education scenes that I didn’t already know from magazines like the British Journal of Photography and Creative Camera.
It turns out, though, that there was so much more to know about Newport and its educational institutions than those magazines imparted and had I known more when I was considering art school then I would have applied to Newport, instead, given the family of my then partner was from the town.
At the time Newport was the location for not just one but two world-class schools teaching documentary, the Newport Film School and the School of Documentary Photography.
Paillard Bolex H16 Rex reflex 16mm movie camera with Kern Switar 10mm 10mm f/1.6 RX, Kern Pizar 25mm f/1.5 RX and Kern Yvar 75mm f/2.8 lenses, and accessories and manuals. Cameras of this type were used by the Newport Film School. Image found on ebay.
The challenges of pre-Internet research
We forget just how difficult it was to do deep primary and secondary research in the years before the World Wide Web when crucial, life-changing information had limited availability or was in the hands of gatekeepers using it as a means of power and control.
That power play came into full force a couple of times when I did the cinematography for a 28-minute science fiction feature film using hardware kindly supplied by the Art & Design department of Perth Technical College as I and my colleagues had been refused the right to study film at what is now Curtin University of Technology.
The college entered our movie in the Channel 7 Young Filmmakers Festival Awards and several days before the presentations night we were informed we had won the award for best film and that my cinematography had won a special award that included some form of special entry into the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) in Sydney.
At the time we knew next to nothing about AFTRS except that it had a connection to Gough Whitlam’s federal Labor government and that broadcaster, columnist and film industry player Phillip Adams had something to do with its founding.
Later we were told that had the unthinkable not occurred we were to be offered free trips east to AFTRS, entry into the study streams of our choice, scholarships and on-campus accomodation: I would have chosen the Cinematography stream.
The power gamers win out and impose the unthinkable
I arrived early on awards night and was accosted by two tenured staffers from Curtin who contended that, due to our project being the very first feature film of any length to be submitted, our awards would have to be denied as they would “damage the university’s prestige” given its students had always been the winners in the past with shorts and trick films and that a mere TAFE college must not be permitted to trample on that prestige.
Our awards were rescinded on the spot, we were blacklisted in the local industry, our team went home before the screenings and our TAFE contact later told us the presenter had commented that it was a shame they would not be showing our film as it was the most remarkable one ever entered.
The camera I used for our 28-minute science fiction feature film
Not our actual camera borrowed from the TAFE college but the same model. Beaulieu S2008 with Schneider-Kreuznach Varigon 7-56mm f/1.8 zoom lens. Image found on ebay.
Perth Tech had at least two movie cameras in its collection, a Super 8 Beaulieu S2008 with Schneider-Kreuznach zoom lens and a more professional Beaulieu 6008 S with zoom lens for staff use only.
I would have preferred the 6008 S for its sound recording ability and superior body and handle design as hand-holding the S2008 was challenging and uncomfortable, to say the least, so I mostly used it mounted on an old wooden Universal fluid-head tripod or a soft-tyred dolly with compressed-air camera head.
Beaulieu 6008 S Super 8 movie camera with Angenieux 6-90mm f/1.4 macro zoom lens, with sound recording capability. Image found on ebay.
Kudos to TISH director Paul Sng for having made a film on a working-class outsider social documentary photographer
That Paul Sng has made a reportedly excellent film about Tish Murtha is a fantastic achievement and that he has made it at all is impressive.
Tish was the ultimate outsider in a time and place apparently hostile to working-class creatives especially those from the North.
Contemporary northern working-class documentary photographers have shared how next-to-impossible it is to build and sustain careers in the field if not based in London and not well-bankrolled.
Photography and photographers of any background and in any speciality have not, in my experience, been attractive as documentary subjects to broadcasters and production companies.
During my stint in London as European Contributing Editor for Australia’s now defunct not only Black+White magazine I had access to many great and famous photographers from around the world and my proposal to make a series on some of them fell on deaf ears in the UK.
“Why would anyone want to watch a photographer taking snaps on television?” was the almost universal response in Wardour Street.
Something similar occurred after my return to Australia although I almost managed to turn my proposals into a “new documentary director commission” from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
That commission was rescinded in the moments before the commissioning editor could confirm by phone that he had just signed the document after then Australian Prime Minister John Howard made an emergency call to demand cancellation resulting in a second blacklisting later followed by the cancellation of my passport by Howard’s foreign minister.
I was on the other end of the line listening to all of this unfold in realtime: I was in Western Australia while the ABC documentaries commissioner was in Sydney.
The first documentary in my proposed series was about an Australian expatriate photojournalist who had discovered the remnants of Vietnam War era Montagnard insurgents in the jungles of northern Laos who were being decimated in a sustained genocide for their part in decades of conflict on behalf of the United States.
My subject was scheduled to make presentations to US Congress and the United Nations on his discoveries and they were to be key segments in my documentary on him and his human rights advocacy work.
If I were to propose making a documentary on Robert Krasker now, would it endure the same fate as my project on the documentary photographer who had, according to many industry pundits at the time, stepped over the bounds of objectivity to become “too involved” in his subjects’ plight?
Right wing governments, it seems, are keen to wage war against activists, whistleblowers, the elderly, the young, the infirm, the poor, the working class, the underclass, the unemployed, immigrants, ethnics and anyone else born different.
My work over the years has been caught up in those wars.
Links
Amateur Photographer – The best documentary photography course in the world? – “When David Hurn set up his Newport documentary photography course in 1973, the idea was simple… half a century later, its legacy continues at the University of South Wales.”
AmberSide – Juvenile Jazz Bands – “A selection of photographs of children’s marching troupes, a particularly North East phenomenon, known as ‘Juvenile Jazz Bands’. Each troupe, dressed in distinctive pseudo-military uniforms complete with peaked caps, miniature busbies, etc, competes in a precision-marching competition, accompanying themselves on drums and kazoos (the reference to ‘jazz’ is rather tenuous).”
Café Royal Books – website – “We make weekly publications, focussing on documentary photography linked to Britain and Ireland, printed and bound locally by a small 170 year old printing company. Libraries and museums around the world collect the books, so the work will remain preserved and accessible for many years.”
Documentary Newport – Internet Archive page – Newport had a film school that taught documentary filmmaking, founded by famous documentary-maker John Grierson. – “Founded in 1966, Newport Film School is the oldest film school in Wales and one of the oldest in the UK. For nearly 50 years the film school has launched the careers of many creative filmmakers working around the world today.”
Modern Films – TISH | Official UK Trailer | In cinemas November 17 – “TISH is the story of working-class photographer Tish Murtha, who captured the impact of Thatcherism on the north of England but was unable to escape the poverty and inequality she exposed.” – video
ScreenDaily – UK’s Documentary Film Council warns of ‘existential threat’ to indie doc sector – “Production funding for indie docs has plummeted and chances of distribution and exhibition for many are “non-existent.” Broadcast slots are also dwindling as are deals with streaming platforms… “Sustaining careers in these conditions is all but impossible aside for a relatively privileged few, which has direct implications for filmmaker wellbeing and the docs sector’s devastating lack of diversity,” the letter said.”
University of South Wales – MA Documentary Photography – “This degree is based (online) and at USW’s purpose-built campus, in the creative centre of Cardiff. The University of South Wales is world-renowned for the study of Documentary Photography and our students and alumni are extremely well regarded within the photographic community.”
Wikipedia – John Grierson – “John Grierson CBE (26 April 1898 – 19 February 1972) was a pioneering Scottish documentary maker, often considered the father of British and Canadian documentary film.”
Wikipedia – Newport Film School – “The Newport Film School was set up in 1966 by Principal John Wright who invited the renowned documentary film maker John Grierson to become its Patron. Grierson’s editorial assistant Harley Jones became the first Lecturer in Cinematography setting up the course with five students and one Bolex camera.”
Wikipedia – University of Wales, Newport – The School of Documentary Photography founded in 1973 by Magnum photojournalist David Hurn was located within this institution until it was merged into the University of South Wales with its campuses in Cardiff, Newport and Pontypridd.
The Robert Krasker Project 