Tish: the best documentary you’ll see next year
If you’re anything like me, you’ll spend a day or two thinking about and then writing a column and still find yourself sitting in a bar in the middle of Liverpool at 9 p.m. on the night when you’ve already missed your intended deadline because you’ve had a sudden change of heart. And you also find yourself angry. And I mean really angry.
They always say “write about what you know” and what I know is that I’ve just come out of the art cinema, here in Liverpool’s FACT, after watching Tish, a new documentary about the British social realist photographer, Tish Murtha. And as much as I should sit and finish the 800 words I’d already written, I can only think about Tish. Everything is about Tish. It’s a film that hit me hard and I know I’ll never stop thinking about Tish in one way or another. I’ve watched nearly 350 films this year and none have affected me this strongly. It’s changed how I think, which is perhaps the highest compliment you can ever give a documentary.
Tish isn’t so much a statement about where we have been as much as it’s a story about the continuing state of arts provision and funding in the UK, but especially here in the North. But to explain why, let’s begin with Murtha whose reputation has been growing year-on-year since she died in 2013.
Her increased profile has been largely due to the efforts of her daughter, Ella, who has already produced three published collections of her mother’s photographs taken, mostly, in the Elswick area of Newcastle upon Tyne. It has also led to Murtha’s entire collection being acquired by the Tate, making her one of the most important social documentarians of the past century. And rightly so. Murtha was working at a time of profound change, in a city in the process of being torn down, within a society being reshaped by the politics of the mid-seventies and then Thatcherism, amid a people who had been largely forgotten.
It lends her photographs a political edge beyond mere reportage. Murtha, accordingly, belongs to a very strong tradition of British urban documentary photography, which includes people like Don McCullin and Chris Killip (who contributed to the film before he died in 2020). Murtha is every bit their equal and perhaps goes places photographically they could never go. McCullin, for example, may have been born into a similar poverty (in his case London) and first achieved fame with his photograph of rockers posed in a dilapidated building, but he transcended his origins, eventually ranking second only to Robert Capa as the greatest photographer of war in the twentieth century. His was the lens through which Vietnam was most poignantly captured.
Murtha’s value was that she didn’t move away to achieve her status. She achieved that by working inside her community. It’s a point that Paul Sng’s film makes repeatedly, both explicitly but, more powerfully, implicitly. The film interviews members of Murtha’s family, many of whom were the subjects of her pictures, and provides a stark endpoint to the stories Murtha had documented at their beginning. If her photographs capture youthful spirits facing impossible odds, the documentary shows their inevitable destiny, still defiant but undoubtedly broken.
Most shocking of all, it also shows how Murtha was herself broken by the policies of both Tory and Labour governments. This is when you realise that this documentary isn’t about photography. It’s a film about life expectations.
Murtha was herself the product of an abusive home, the girl who refused to cry even when her father beat her so hard that she was left with scars. Her life was similarly a struggle. She found her first camera discarded in a building, and even though it contained no film, she would carry it around as a deterrent to the curb crawlers who lurked around the estate.
That power was soon more than symbolic. Once she had access to film, she started to record a community being failed by the system. From the start, she was as angry as she was instinctively a documentarian and photographer. Asked at art school why she wanted to become a photographer, she replied: “I want to take pictures of policemen kicking children”. There could be no better answer.
The film uses the voice of actress Maxine Peake to articulate Murtha’s writing, including painful – and frankly shameful – extracts from her funding applications. These extracts resonate with the frustrations of an artist trying to accommodate the demands of a funding system with other goals in mind, chiefly the pandering and patronising beautification of the working class.
Although the film depicts how Murtha’s death robbed the UK of one of our best artistic talents, it was a talent already being squandered. Her later years were spent in poverty, unable to even afford black and white film yet still desperate to photograph the world around her. Instead, she was pursued by the DWP and forced into a variety of jobs, including working in a meat packing factory. One is left thinking: if this happened to Tish Murtha, then how many others have been failed by the same system? How many great artists have fallen into obscurity simply because they didn’t benefit from the dedication of an Ella Murtha? Put more crudely: how can capitalism allow so much value to be squandered?
At tonight’s screening here in Liverpool, the film was followed by a Q&A with (among others) the documentary’s producer, Jen Corcoran, and this is where the inner story of the film became the outer story of the film’s production. As much as Tish is about Tish Murtha, it’s also a film about a working-class producer from the North East making a documentary about a working-class photographer well on her way to becoming an icon of her time and place… How much have things changed? Clearly, very little. The film is a labour of love but unpaid labour. Both the producer and director worked for nothing to make this film and, even then, came under pressure to make a different, shorter film.
And so it goes. Tish is a damning condemnation of a system that sees no value in the arts, artists, or that economy that governments are so quick to claim as their own at times of national celebration. It’s a film that again proves that having a voice is a privilege afforded to those already with privilege and whose voices we have already heard too often. It also sits at odds with an arts establishment that continues to make the same mistakes that would have condemned Tish Murtha to obscurity. Arts provision is too often a crude sop in the communities it’s meant to serve, served by people from outside those communities making decisions about how those communities should be represented. (Somewhat fittingly, the same venue showing Tish has just cancelled its regular spoken word event for reasons too complicated but also too common to explain). Grants are available for galleries to run workshops to introduce working-class kids to photography, but not to working-class photographers already inside those communities. The galleries are as complicit in this as the grant providers. They just don’t get it or, rather, they are not allowed to get it.
If you want to understand the life of a working artist, unique voices capturing the nuances of northern life during some of the hardest days of the eighties, or, indeed, what it’s like working in (and from) a disadvantaged place, then catch Tish now on the biggest screen you can while it’s on limited release. Murtha’s photographs look spectacular when blown up to cinema scale. Her anger scales proportionally too. You might leave feeling how I feel tonight: we need people like Tish. A few less people like “Rish”.
@DavidWaywell
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