15/06/2023 - Documentarian Paul Sng surveys the life of British photographer Tish Murtha, who trained her lens on the country’s deprived yet resilient North East

A viewing of Paul Sng’s docu-biopic Tish, which opened the 30th edition of Sheffield DocFest yesterday, raises the question of how merely pursuing the vocation of an artist sets you up for posterity, and the relativity of all value judgements of a work. For Sng’s documentary relates the tale – reminiscent of a fair few individuals from the visual arts – of Tish Murtha, a working-class documentary photographer who died destitute and unappreciated, yet whose output has been gradually canonised by the art world. Its bittersweet closing images of reproductions of her work, adorning the permanent displays in London’s Tate Britain gallery, with her beaming grown-up daughter Ella gazing on in shot, prove that the arc of (art) history sometimes bends towards justice, albeit far too late.

Photography, her medium of expression, created its own issues as well. Receiving some institutional support in the turbulent 1980s, courtesy of government grants and occasional gallery commissions, Murtha’s work was still at risk of being taken for granted: her black-and-white, 35mm-gauge portraits of Newcastle’s residents, flanked by the now-razed industrial landscape, now provides a time capsule and epitaph for a way of life – documentary significance that would have been overlooked by observers of its time. Back in the day, despite Murtha’s evident talent, completely apparent from the photos themselves, which never skirt miserabilism or dreaded “poverty porn”, and her colleagues’ testimony, especially of her feisty personal manner and trade-unionist convictions, there weren’t many prospects to parlay her idiosyncratic artistic output into a steady wage, especially as she began to raise her sole daughter, Ella, by herself.

Sng’s film – a spiritual companion piece to his previous feature Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché, on the titular UK punk rabble-rouser – proceeds chronologically, tracking Ella’s settling of her mother’s affairs following her suffering a brain aneurysm at the age of 56. Having discovered numerous rolls of negative (and, equally importantly, her meticulously organised caption system, as well as private diaries), she set about a reclamation project, shepherding the publication of new hardback editions of her main photo series, and accompanying Sng to interview her surviving siblings (she was one of ten), plus the tutors and classmates from the Wales art college where she received formal training as a scholarship student, having left school at 16.

Although its subject matter overlaps with Ken Loach’s recent films and sphere of interest – which, of course, are venerated far beyond the British Isles – it’s likely that Tish will chiefly resonate in its home country of the UK, where it has secured theatrical distribution through Modern Films. “This is England,” the photographs and, by extension, Sng’s film seem to be declaiming – the heritage, recent history and vivid faces, full of potential and undeserving of the chronic unemployment afflicting the region in that era, captured in monochrome-tinted sunlight by Murtha’s lens and darkroom processing, which we must forget at our peril. And we won’t any time soon, by the evidence of this sombrely powerful documentary.

Tish is a UK production staged by Freya Films. Its world sales are handled by Together Films.