Tish

I recently watched Tish, a film about social documentary photographer Tish Murtha.

Documentaries about photographers have a particular interest to me. I love hearing the story of the person behind the camera. Not only the interesting life they led (photographers usually led interesting lives back in the day), but also to understand how they arrived at photography, why they took the pictures they did, and, of course, how they approached their work.

Tish Murtha grew up in the 1950s with nine siblings in Elswick, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a working class neighbourhood suffering hard times. She studied photography at university in Wales and returned to Newcastle to document “marginalised communities from the inside”. Her work captures the hard life people lived through with humanity and a real poignancy. Her photos were candid but earned through a trust she developed by living in the community and spending time with the people there. She shot exclusively in black and white, and throughout her career she always used the same Olympus OM1n camera.

The documentary is told through the eyes of her daughter who interviews friends and family. It has a real sadness to it, revealing the struggle of the community but also that of Tish herself as a photographer. Her work is wonderful, but she never seemed to get the recognition or opportunities of her peers in her career – that only seemed to come posthumously.

It’s a powerful yet humbling film, showing Tish to be someone as passionate and driven about photography as she was about social justice. Her work highlighted the working-class struggle, making the unseen visible. A strong reminder of why documentary photography matters—just as much about truth as it is about art.