There’s passion in this heartrending documentary from film-maker Paul Sng, comparable to his excellent earlier film about Poly Styrene, of X-Ray Spex. It is about the Tyneside photographer Tish Murtha who chronicled working-class lives in the north east in the 70s and 80s (and also those of Soho sex workers in London), earning for herself the nickname “Demon Snapper” in the papers.
She showed the reality of poverty and deprivation in communities where the misery of unemployment had been allowed to settle by the Westminster political classes who considered it a price worth other people paying for the boon of undermining trade union power. But in capturing the faces, particularly the faces of children, Murtha showed her subjects’ humour, optimism and refusal to be cowed. The film is presented with enormous humanity and warmth by Murtha’s grownup daughter Ella, who is an eerie likeness of her late mother. It is Ella who mediates the film’s emotional message in talking to Tish Murtha’s relatives and to her friends and teachers at the School of Documentary Photography in Newport.
