CHILDHOODS
SIDE
1977-2016
01|1-|16 - 27|11|16
EXHIBITION TEXTS
CHILDHOODS crosses four continents opening up stories about young people that are often ignored or
misrepresented. It brings together film and photography created between 1977, when Side Gallery first opened,
and now. New photography stands alongside work we have shown over recent years and exhibitions Amber/Side
has produced, commissioned, acquired and now holds in its unique collection.
The images and films which have been brought together to create CHILDHOODS have all been selected from
much larger exhibitions, publications and film projects, many developed themselves over several years. Themes
and concerns intersect across a range of artistic motivations, approaches and standpoints. Within and between
its different bodies of work CHILDHOODS creates a complex portrait of children’s imaginative lives, the social
contexts they deal with and their resilience. The exhibition includes images from the following:
PORTRAITS AND DREAMS 1975 - 1982 Wendy Ewald
JUVENILE JAZZ BANDS 1978 - 1979 Tish Murtha
STEP BY STEP 1980 - 1987 Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen
SEACOAL 1982 - 1984 Chris Killip
THE TIME OF HER LIFE 1984 - 2004 Lesley McIntyre
SHIFTING GROUND 1997 - 2005 Dean Chapman
DOVANA FILMS 2000 - 2016 Duco Tellegen
ALL DRESSED UP 2004 - 2005 Karen Robinson
CLASSROOM PORTRAITS 2004 - 2012 Julian Germain
WHERE CHILDREN SLEEP 2008 - 2010 James Mollison
SYRIAN COLLATERAL 2014 - 2016 Kai Wiedenhöfer
HOME MADE IN SMETHWICK 2015 - 2016 Liz Hingley
Classroom Portraits
Julian Germain
When Julian Germain took his daughter to school for the first time in 2004, he realised he hadn’t been
inside a classroom for more than 20 years. It brought about a reflection of that period, from infancy to
the brink of adulthood, when school is such a fundamental part of almost all our daily lives. Our school
days are a collective, formative experience, a memory matrix allowing complete strangers to find
common ground. Certain teachers, lessons, classrooms, homework, exams, friends, rivals, the uniform,
bags, books, enthusiasm, boredom, moments of pride and success, of shame and failure and so on,
are all entwined with the complexities of the wider world beyond the school gates and the physical
characteristics of growing up. For most people, the recollections are generally positive, the experience
regarded, at worst, as a necessary, as well as an obligatory part of childhood. For some, the experience
casts a dark shadow over their entire lives.
Using a large format camera, Germain developed a process of making straightforward documentary
records of the classroom spaces and pupils at the end of lessons, in the finest possible detail. He never
tells the students how they should look but their precise placement is crucial as he tries to ensure that
everybody is in clear view of the camera. Also, the exposure time is usually a quarter or half a second
so there is a collective process of choreography and concentration in readiness for the moment the
shutter is released.
Since 2004, an archive of hundreds of portraits has been created, featuring classrooms from all over
the world. Occasionally, they are accompanied by statistics, additional layers of detail that photography
can’t reveal about the pupils’ likes, dislikes, beliefs and opinions. The data is both serious and playful and
the marriage of photography and statistics seems to acknowledge the partial relationship that both
media have with notions of the truth.
The images confirm that the basic classroom model is the same wherever you are in the world, but
they also reveal incredible variety within that space. At the vanguard of this diversity are of course the
thousands of individuals portrayed, each one utterly unique. Photographs always immediately refer to
the past but because these pictures are all of children and adolescents who have their lives ahead of
them, implicit in this collection, with its hopes, dreams and uncertainties, is the future.
Roy
(Duco Tellegen, Dovana Films, 2004, 29 mins)
The film tells the story of a ten-year-old boy in a small Peruvian village. Instead of going to school he
often goes to the local mine, where under extraordinarily difficult and dangerous conditions he attempts
to extract enough gold to help lift his family out of poverty. It was made as part of the documentary
series Living Rights.
Toti
(Duco Tellegen, Dovana Films, 2004, 26 mins)
Toti is a Maasai girl of fourteen. When she was eleven, her mother told her that she was to be married
and consequently circumcised. The cattle her family would receive from her marriage were badly needed.
Having run away, and her twin sister having been married off in her place, three years later, she tries to
reconnect with her sister and family. The film was made as part of the documentary series Living Rights.
All Dressed Up
Teenage Girls in East Durham
Karen Robinson
One of Side Gallery’s Coalfield Stories commissions, Robinson’s work was first shown in 2005. Over
the previous couple of years she had approached, listened to and engaged with the teenage girls who
regularly hung around the streets of various villages and towns of East Durham.
At the time, Easington District had one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the country. Many
young people in the area were and still are ‘slipping through the net’. Failed by the educational system, in
communities ravaged by the demise of heavy industry, with few opportunities and a lack of investment,
their own aspirations can often seem unrealistic.
Each group of girls had a special place to which they would always go. At first they thought it was
strange that I wanted to photograph their lives, but then, maybe, it was something a bit different; maybe
they liked someone taking a bit of notice. I loved their sense of humour, was shocked at times by their
innocence, at others by their knowledge and by the experiences they have had to deal with.
One of the girls, in trouble with the police for drugs and in care for a time, was three months pregnant
when I first met her, standing in shock and disbelief, not sure who the father was. I later watched her
lovingly feed her daughter and listened to adults talking about how much she had grown up. The girls
opened up a glimpse into their lives in all their contradictions and complexities: at home, on the streets,
following interests, out on the town... And there was the American style school prom, choosing dresses,
having their hair and make-up done and badgering their teacher to let me come too.
Seacoal
Chris Killip
Chris Killip began photographing the seacoalers of Lynemouth beach, Northumberland in 1982, after
nearly seven years of failed efforts to obtain their consent. During 1983 to 1984 he lived in a caravan,
which Amber bought on the seacoalers’ site and also used to develop its first feature drama. Killip
documented the life, work and struggle to survive there.
When I first saw the beach at Lynemouth in January 1976, I recognized the industry above it but nothing
else I was seeing. The beach beneath me was full of activity with horses and carts backed into the sea.
Men were standing in the sea next to the carts, using small wire nets attached to poles to fish out the
coal from the water beneath them. The place confounded time; here the Middle Ages and the twentieth
century intertwined.
Seacoal came from the uneconomical coal waste which was tipped into the sea by the National Coal
Board (NCB) from the Ellington pit at Lynemouth. The coal would separate from the waste in the water
wash up onto the beach. However, quantity was very unpredictable and successful haulage depended
on many factors, such as the tides, the wind and the amount of coal waste being tipped. The people who
collected and survived off it, were at the mercy of these factors and Killip described the camp as “an
exacting place, hostile to strangers, filled with stories, then activity, then lethargy, for more often than
not there is no coal, and it’s a process of waiting and hoping. It is also full of friendship and rivalry, and
the overriding primitive force of survival.”
Killip’s images form a narrative of a small, unique, tight-knit community, where local seacoalers lived
alongside settled travellers, and in which the work was intertwined with the lifestyle of those who were
doing it. Entire families lived in the camp and children are strong presence, photographed alongside
their parents on weekends and school holidays, combining work with play and making the most of their
environment.
The seacoal camp has since been leveled and landscaped and is now an approved caravan site for
Travellers. The Ellington pit is gone and with it the seacoal.
Shifting Ground
Dean Chapman
These photographs, taken in Crook, Willington and St Helen Auckland around the Millennium, come
from Dean Chapman’s long-term examination of post-industrial experience in and around the towns
and villages of South West Durham, which was ravaged by the pit closure programme of the 1960s.
Developed between 1997 and 2005 as one of Side Gallery’s Coalfield Stories commissions, the whole
project documents the continuities and social fractures within the former mining communities and their
cultures.
The first stage of the project, shown at Side Gallery in 2001 focused significantly on the experiences of
children and young people, their social interaction, play, hobbies and pastimes.
Shifting Ground is held in the AmberSide Collection. More work from the exhibition can be seen on our
website, www.amber-online.com.
Where Children Sleep
James Mollison
These are stories of children across the world, told through portraits and pictures of their bedrooms.
When photographer James Mollison was commissioned to come up with an idea for engaging with
children’s rights, he found himself thinking about his bedroom: how significant it was during his
childhood, and how it reflected what he had and who he was.
It occurred to him that a way to address some of the complex situations and social issues affecting
children would be to look at the bedrooms of children in all kinds of different circumstances. From
the start, Mollison didn’t want it just to be about ‘needy children’ in the developing world, but rather
something more inclusive, about children from all types of situations.
Portraits and Dreams
Wendy Ewald
Between 1975 and 1982, in the coalfields of Letcher County, Kentucky, where one-third of all
families were living below the poverty level, Wendy Ewald worked as an artist in the schools, teaching
photography and filmmaking to students, aged from 6 to 14.
As they became more comfortable with the camera, I wanted them to expand their ideas about picture
making but to stay close to what they felt deeply. I asked them to photograph themselves, their
families, their animals, their community, stories they could tell with pictures and finally their dreams
or fantasies. When they made self-portraits they learned that they could be the subject of their own
photographs and create characters for themselves. The assignment to photograph their dreams
brought into play their imaginary world. Before they began to establish a receptive audience for their
very personal and often frightening fantasies, we closed ourselves in the darkroom, sat on the floor and
told each other our scariest dreams. The photographs they took afterwards broke new ground for many
of them. They saw they could produce whatever image they wanted.
Scott Huff hadn’t had any luck with his pictures until then, but he strode into my room triumphant with
his roll of dream pictures. He told me they would be good if he could develop them right. His hands
trembled as he agitated the developing tank, but he had no problems and a fine series of pictures – “A
flying dream” – resulted. Allen Shepherd had a fight with his best friend, Ricky Dixon. He and Ricky had
swapped knives and Allen felt shortchanged. They weren’t speaking to each other until one night Allen
had a dream that he’d killed Ricky, He decided to make a photograph of Ricky dead in the forks of a tree.
He asked Ricky to pose for him, and during the making of the photograph the two boys made up.
Ewald released an extraordinary creativity, combining the magic of childhood vision and acute powers of
observation. The world they present is small and intimate, but their perception of it is detailed, accepting
and complex. This small selection from that body of work focuses on the children’s dream images. The
full exhibition was first shown at Side Gallery in 1986 and is held in the AmberSide Collection.
The Time of Her Life
Lesley McIntyre
When McIntyre’s daughter Molly was born in 1984, it was revealed she was suffering from a muscular
abnormality and the doctors thought it was highly unlikely she would survive more than a few weeks or
months, most likely never leaving the hospital. In spite of this, McIntyre did take her home and Molly lived
until her fourteenth birthday. In all of this time, her condition was never properly diagnosed.
Before the birth, McIntyre assumed she’d be able to combine her career as a photographer with being
a parent. She did achieve this, but not in the manner she anticipated. Grounded in domestic life and
unable to pursue the commissions she might have done had her child been more robust, McIntyre began
recording the details of the day to day and found observing childhood fascinating. The first pictures
were taken shortly after Molly’s birth and the last a few days before she died at home in South London.
Molly’s is a story that crosses all barriers of race, class and gender. Any family, at any time or anywhere
in the world can find themselves confronted by the reality of disability. Having spent years fighting so
that her child would not be socially and educationally marginalized by her physical disability, McIntyre is
fully aware of how resistant many people are to engaging with such subject matter. This is not confined
to disability alone – but to death, and in particular child death, one of the most powerful taboos –
16,000 children a year die before they are 18 in the UK.
This series of black and white photographs reveal a life full of vitality and the ordinariness of growing
up, despite the challenges both Molly and McIntyre faced on a daily basis. An extremely bright and
well-loved child, mature beyond her years, McIntyre hopes that Molly’s legacy is that she gave so many
people the capacity to engage with life and to feel.
Four days before she died, Lesley took the final photograph. ‘I have a brain that works and a body that
doesn’t,’ Molly had said. What Molly also had was a childhood and it was a good childhood. What she did
not have was an adulthood.
Yoshi
(Duco Tellegen, Dovana Films, 2004, 29 mins)
Yoshi is a sixteen-year-old Japanese schoolboy who has Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism. Feeling
caught between two worlds, Yoshi’s dream is to attend a regular Japanese high school. The film was
made as part of the documentary series Living Rights, which explored the United Nation’s convention on
children’s rights from the perspective of everyday life and intimate portraits of children’s lives.
Dreams of a Kite
Nhom
(Duco Tellegen, Dovana Films, 2000, 24 mins)
13 year old Nhom lost his leg and both parents in 1995, during the Cambodian civil war. He was
subsequently raised by his aunt but in order to carve out some kind of future for himself, despite his
handicap, he has to leave his younger brother and aunt to get an education at an orphanage in the big
city. There, he is fitted with a new leg prosthesis, but battles loneliness and shame about his handicap
until he befriends another boy who lost his leg, and they share their experiences.
‘Dreams of a Kite’ is part of the ‘Behind Closed Eyes’ documentary series which looks at four children
with very different experiences of war and how they deal with their past whilst finding the willpower to
carry on with their lives.
Step by Step
Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen
The wish to photograph a dancing school may seem like a paradox, as the two basic elements of dance,
music and movement, inevitably elude a stills camera. After Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s visit to a small
dancing school in Tyneside, she wrote with mixed feelings: The first time I walked in and saw thirty
children, some of them only three or four years old, dance a Cha-Cha with amazing perfection, amazing
hair-do’s and dresses, smiles and make-up, it nearly knocked me out!
After frustrated attempts to capture the atmosphere in straightforward documentary photographs,
Konttinen made a series of photo-montages, which she conceded at the time were a more private trip
into a fantasy than an insight into the dreams of others, and ended up taking jiving lessons instead of
photographs.
In the early 1980s Amber Films made Keeping Time, an experimental drama growing out of Konttinen’s
documentation of the Connell-Brown Dancing School in North Shields. She stayed on after the filming
to continue her photographic project, resulting in an exhibition at Side Gallery in 1984 and a book of the
work in 1987.
The realities of unemployment, poverty, racism, divorce and hard work are interwoven with the fun and
excitement of the dancing school. The words and pictures open up on the importance of home and
family, the hard-headed yet often humorous resilience with which difficulties are faced, the importance
of the school as a female community, the women’s robust combination of romanticism and pragmatism.
Konttinen intended the study to be an attempt at putting a finger on the troublesome, but compelling
nucleus of female experience, hoping it would act as a springboard for both critical and sympathetic
examination of female lives within our society, whilst also offering an insight into our own dreams as well
as the dreams of others.
Step by Step is held in the AmberSide Collection. More work from the exhibition can be seen on our
website, www.amber-online.com.
Juvenile Jazzbands
Tish Murtha
Juvenile jazz bands began in working class coalmining areas of the North of England and the Midlands,
with a few bands in the mining areas of Wales. They originated in the tradition of miners’ union marches
and colliery brass bands. In the badly hit communities of the 1930s Depression, men without jobs
or money and little prospect of either formed bands in an attempt to create solidarity and to provide
themselves with a cheap, accessible and creative entertainment, in which their children were
encouraged to participate.
Working at Side Gallery, herself working on a Manpower Services Commission unemployment project,
in 1979 photographer Tish Murtha, developed a project on the resurgence of the Juvenile Jazz Band
phenomenon. The project which took six months to complete, left her feeling far from complimentary
towards its altered reincarnation. She felt they were ‘paramilitary and anti-musical’ and wanted to use
the images to stimulate debate about their ‘value’.
Murtha was also concerned about the right-wing political associations of the new form of jazz band and
questioned the allocation of local authority grants towards what she deemed to be ‘poor substitutes
for creative recreational activity’, particularly as they ‘reigned supreme’ in areas of economic and social
deprivation, such as her native West End of Newcastle, which she stated was ‘an area categorized by
and noted for its inadequate facilities, including everything from housing to public telephones. Children’s
leisure activities being no exception...’
In addition to the official bands, Murtha photographed the small groups of children, who improvised
‘toy bands’ on the streets, many of them jazz band rejects. As Murtha wrote, ‘often starting out as an
attempt to emulate the big band, (they) involve the child’s imagination to almost the same extent as the
‘official’ band denies it.’
At the time, Murtha’s photographs and commentary were controversial, upsetting some within the jazz
band community. Today they serve as an important documentation of a time, place and popular working
class interest and form of play for many children in the 1970s and 80s.
Home Made in Smethwick
Liz Hingley
The tastes of home are never left behind; they define children’s long-term relationship with food and
accompany people through their lives. They cement relationships and are passed on and transformed by
new generations and new contexts...
Smethwick emerged as an industrial centre during the C19th. Rows and rows of tightly packed terraced
houses were planted on the surrounding farmland to accommodate the factory workers arriving on
masse from the countryside. Since then, these modest houses have become the spaces of new
beginnings and have been continually adapted and personalised to suit myriad lifestyles and homestyles. From the 1950s onwards the paths leading to these homes have extended further and further
across the globe.
On her initial wanderings, Liz Hingley found Smethwick’s densely populated streets surprisingly quiet.
Only a rich mix of smells seeping out from behind closed doors filled the silent air. Naturally when
resources to make a home in a new environment are limited, food comes before wallpaper or even beds.
The taste of home feeds both the body and the mind.
Posing the simple question, ‘What is your favourite recipe?’ from door to door, Hingley was welcomed
into homes to join the preparation of personal dishes rich with meaning and memory. Conversation
flowed over the kneading of family-size naans; it continued over the harvesting of herbs grown from
seeds stuffed into suitcases; and while waiting for blueberry crumble to bake with a cup of Pakistani
pink tea. Cooking and eating together drew out remarkable life stories and revealed the complex
journeys that have brought people from 130 different countries (and sometimes from just down the
street) to their Smethwick home.
Rather than a cookbook, this collection of portraits and recipes reveals how food can act as a bridge
from one continent to another; from one generation to the next; and from one house to its neighbour.
All those I met contributed to this celebration of the social heritage and culinary richness of Smethwick
today. With the aim of capturing the essence of a community, I have been the lucky guest at their table
and passenger on their journey.
Home Made in Smethwick was commissioned and produced by Multistory. Multistory is a community
arts organisation located in Sandwell, in the Black Country, who invite photographers to make new work
with, for, and in response to, the lives and experiences of local people. Multistory is grateful for the
support of Arts Council England and Sandwell Council
Eranda
(Duco Tellegen, Dovana Films, 2001, 25 mins)
Eranda (7) and her family fled the war in Kosovo. Her life as a refugee takes her from a Macedonian camp
to a shelter in the Netherlands. Although she finds herself further and further away from home, the war
stays close to her. Finally, they leave the Dutch shelter to go home, where an emotional reunion with her
relatives awaits her.
Malak & Mustafa
(Duco Tellegen, Dovana Films, 2016, 9 mins)
Two Syrian children, Malak (7) and Mustafa (14) give personal accounts of their experiences of
journeying from their homeland to the shores of Greece.
Syrian Collateral
Kai Wiedenhöfer
These portraits and stories are of just five of the many wounded children in this bloody conflict. They
were taken in refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon between spring 2014 and 2015. Wiedenhöfer has
documented the aftermaths of modern warfare in both Gaza and Syria. The media focus on the numbers
of the dead. He uses his work to raise support for the injured, who are often forgotten, left in real need,
enduring the emotional and physical impacts of war. He writes:
It is a paradox of war that the injury of a single person makes the biggest impression on us; the one
whose face we can see, the one whose name and fate we can actually recall. The bigger the number of
the victims the less we are touched emotionally. Instead of increasing our consternation, large numbers
somehow numb the reality of it. Numbers are abstract – people are not.
I will always remember Sundus Hawarna, an 11 year-old school girl from Jasim in Southern Syria. She
lost her eye and her whole family in a barrel bomb explosion. Sundus was extremely shaky. She abruptly
started crying heavily, when we were sitting together with her aunt Amal, who now takes care of her.
Amal comforted her and told me that this is now normal behavior for Sundus: She starts crying all of a
sudden, many times a day – the abrupt death of her father, mother and her three brothers haunts her
constantly. Sundus is one of more than one and a half million Syrians who have been wounded in the
Syrian civil war, which began in Spring 2011.
According to the annual report of the World Health Organization 25,000 people were injured monthly in
2015 – most of them severely. 45% of the injured are children and women. About 10-15% suffer from
amputations or disabilities. Daily shelling by heavy weapons is the primary source of the injuries; but as I
say numbers are abstract, people are not.
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