Tish: Each photograph Tish Murphy took was an act of solidarity, the antithesis of ‘poverty porn’

Paul Sng’s exemplary documentary Tish chronicles the life and work of the late photographer Tish Murtha. One of nine siblings, Murtha was born and raised in the impoverished Elswick area of Newcastle at a moment when closing mines and steelworks, Margaret Thatcher’s war on the industrialised and unionised classes, and record unemployment had ravaged communities throughout the region.

Roaming the derelict streets and houses, the young Tish happened upon a camera and found that it repelled predators on the lookout for unattended youngsters. Even her earliest images of family and neighbours speak to an extraordinary talent. Her monochrome street photographs, depicting hardy children in misadventurous situations, brought her to the School of Documentary Photography, in south Wales, where a teacher acted as guarantor for a hire-purchase Olympus from Dixons. The teacher is one of many admiring friends and contemporaries who appear on camera, speaking to Ella Murtha, Tish’s daughter, who is a lively and loving presence at the heart of Sng’s film.

The actor Maxine Peake gives a passionate voice to Murtha’s stingingly observant notes and letters from the margins of British society. Her words remain depressingly urgent, articulating a tragic throughline from Thatcher’s Tories to contemporary Newcastle, a disenfranchised area that has been the poignant anchor of two of Ken Loach’s recent films.

Murtha’s images and commentary on everything from trade unions and the 1980s northwestern craze for jazz bands are furious. There are parallels with Dorothea Lange’s shots of the United States during the Depression and, more locally, with the committed working-class milieu of Clio Barnard. Nicknamed the “Demon Snapper”, Murtha made work that remains vibrant and empathetic against the most austere backdrops; it is, as several contributors note, the antithesis of “poverty porn”; each snap is an act of solidarity.

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Her photographs continue to startle, whether taken in her own borough or in Soho, where she documented sex workers in the 1980s. Tish Murtha spent her last years applying for menial jobs, unable to make a living from photography. She died in poverty, after having to choose between heating and eating under Tony Blair’s New Deal, in 2013. Her work now features in the National Portrait Gallery and Tate Britain.

Tish is on limited release and on Curzon Home Cinema