ANOTHER KIND OF LOVE STORY

an essay by Max Houghton

Love’s light shines brightly through every scene of new documentary film Tish, but not the romantic kind. It is present each time Ella, daughter of trailblazing photographer Tish Murtha, speaks about her mother’s extraordinary visual legacy. You can see it in her eyes; her mother’s eyes. It’s there when Tish’s siblings, friends and teachers recall her memory and her spirit. It is woven like a golden thread, making connections between moving and still images that create this film’s rhythm. And it pervades every photograph Tish made: her gaze when she photographed people was a loving one, fuelled by an uncompromising, fierce anger towards the systems that kept people impoverished. Love is complicated; messy, uneven, brutal. It doesn’t even save you. 

Two small children sitting on a wall, hands clasped in their laps, as though each holding something precious, foreheads touching, eyes locked in a forever gaze. Street action swirls around them; they remain oblivious, encircled by a forcefield of innocent love.

Red for danger. In the red glow of the darkroom, Tish performs her lightwork. An earthly magician, she conjures the faces of her family, her friends, her people as she sees them: people she loves with all her heart, people who have been spat out by a free-market society, kids who are kicked by the police, families whose livelihoods were snatched from under them. Elswick, where Tish and her family were born and raised, was dubbed the ‘worst square mile’ in England; it was in one of the derelict houses that Tish found her first camera, which she understood immediately could offer a way to show the consequences of this deliberate war against a whole class of people- she referred to it as a ‘bitter conflict’ - and as a way of insisting they mattered, as she held them in her furious and loving gaze. 

Four boys standing on four pillars, their faded grandeur overwritten by graffiti. Tish + Billy for posterity. Clothes too big, too small, too young to smoke, smoking. Catching sight of these latter-day saints, a passer-by looks up, and smiles. 

The Murtha siblings and their friends owned this territory; the film follows Ella as she draws out their youthful stories. She radiates love and affection for her uncles and aunts, Tish’s siblings, during the interviews. She listens to her uncle Glenn’s memories of the risks he took, working for his father, 80 feet up in the dark, hunting for copper or lead in abandoned buildings. Dangerous pursuits for children, but it was in his blood, he says, ‘I loved it. It was like an adventure to me, a treasure hunt.’ Another brother, Carl, the youngest, wanted to be an actor. Such futures weren’t written for young men from Elswick. He was offered an ‘opportunity’ to clean the streets, to dig the weeds from between the cracks in the pavements; he took a wrong turn, ended up with a prison sentence. Ella tells him he’s stunning, in one of Tish’s photographs. He’s reclining on a sofa, smoking. In an adjacent universe, he’s a young Donald Sutherland. Tish captured his aura, saw him as a shining star. No wonder, then, he misses her to bits.

Night-time, London, a woman in a fur coat, gazing towards the lights of the theatre. She is naked underneath her furs, which have been shrugged down to waist-height, their folds forming wings. 

In 1983, Tish moved to London for a while, fed up with feeling she ought to be grateful for her position at Side Gallery. Her friend Karen was a dancer in Soho, and Tish was able to immerse herself in that scene, too, where she made friends for life, including Ella’s fairy godfather. She photographed it all, of course. During this time, believing herself to be ill, even dying, Tish was in fact pregnant, with Ella, and the two of them created a life together, soon returning to the north-east. As the film makes manifest, Tish’s talent was on a par with the great Chris Killip and David Hurn, who each encouraged her. Yet she couldn’t find a way to make a living from her great love. As she was making what would become her final bodies of work, in a cemetery near her home, she was also applying for salaried jobs in which she might be able to transfer her skills. Her cv stated photography as a kind of hobby. Luminous Ella’s purpose and dedication, which animate this film, secured her mother’s rich photographic legacy, finally sealing an acquisition by Tate of the work of Tish Murtha. Through Tish’s eyes, a whole generation is seen, recognised, and remembered.

Carl, Paul and Tony lounge around on the ground, legs outstretched, sharing the easy banter of close friends. The writing is on the wall: Cops Piss Off.

What survives of us, to quote a resolutely unsentimental English poet, is love.