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Thursday 11am - 5pm Friday 11am - 5pm Saturday 11am - 5pm Sunday 11am - 5pm

Side Gallery

Dedicated to Documentary Photography since 1977.
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Side Gallery is committed to exhibiting the best in international humanist documentary, its concerns rooted in a long-term engagement with working class, marginalised and threatened communities in the North of England – and by extension with the experiences of those documented by some of the finest photographers working across the world. It is committed to preserving and making accessible these ex

traordinary bodies of work, whilst using them to inform, lever and sustain the new production that will continue to take documentary practice forward. Side is centrally concerned with visual narratives: the quality of the imagery; the aesthetic and moral questions that are raised; sharing visions of the world and the marginalised experience to which they are able to give such insistent power.

28/05/2026

🌼 “Observatory Hill rises up above Durham and overlooks the city’s Cathedral and World Heritage Site. In May and June, the hill is covered in buttercups and other wildflowers.”

Kevin Edworthy’s Observatory Hill, Durham captures a place shaped as much by seasonal ritual as landscape. As he writes: “At the end of the summer term, a popular Durham University tradition is to gather with your mates on top of the hill and watch the sun setting over the Cathedral.”

“Students will fetch old armchairs and other student collectibles such as road signs and traffic cones, up to the summit, to make their evenings more comfortable.”

📸 Observatory Hill, Durham, 2024 © Kevin Edworthy

Feeling inspired? Submit your photographs to "MySide: Local Colour": sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/myside

27/05/2026

🎬 "Made Together: Amber Films & The Workshop Movement" is now open at Tyneside Cinema.

The display explores Amber Films’ place within the 1980s Workshop Movement, when collective, non-commercial and regionally rooted filmmaking was given national support.

With examples from stills, scripts, notes, flyers and archival material, "Made Together" looks at how Amber developed films through long-term relationships with communities, combining research, documentary observation, drama, local knowledge and trust.

With a focus on Keeping Time (1983), Seacoal (1985), Double Vision (1986) and In Fading Light (1989), the display traces a filmmaking practice shaped by class, labour, gender, regional identity and everyday life.

📍 The Gallery, Floor 3, Tyneside Cinema
📅 From 26 May
🎟️ Free to visit

Find out more: sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/made-together

📸 ACTT Workshop Declaration Handbook, June 1984
📸 Production Continuity Polaroids, Keeping Time, 1982–83 © Amber Films
📸 Behind the Scenes Production Still, Seacoal, 1984/85 © Amber Films

26/05/2026

🔥 “It’s my vision of Hell, that - and yet I loved working in the coke works.”

Peter Fryer documented Derwenthaugh Coke Works between 1986 and 1989 as the plant closed in the aftermath of the Miners’ Strike. The works sat on the south bank of the Tyne near Swalwell, on a site that had previously held Crowley’s Ironworks, once the largest ironworks in Europe.

At the same moment Derwenthaugh was shutting down, the Metrocentre was rising a few miles away inside a newly designated Enterprise Zone. Fryer’s project follows that political shift directly: from dangerous industrial labour to the new promise of consumption and “enterprise culture.”

Here we're sharing Fryer's images of the works themselves, photographs that hold onto the physical reality of the works. Fire, smoke, toxic dust, heat and exhaustion. And workers moving through conditions most people would never willingly enter.

🔗 Explore the full series: sidegallery.co.uk/collection/coke-to-coke

📸 Coke to Coke: Derwenthaugh Cokeworks, 1986–1989 © Peter Fryer

25/05/2026

☀️ Bank holiday plans...

📸 Village is a Global World, 1994 © Jindřich Štreit

23/05/2026

📷 Join us! InSide: documentary photographers meet-up!

InSide is a monthly space for photographers who care about documentary. A place to share work in progress, talk things through, ask questions, and connect with others navigating the same practice. It’s relaxed, supportive, and shaped by the people in the room.

**PLEASE NOTE, DUE TO THE BANK HOLIDAYS IN MAY, THIS MONTH'S MEETING WILL BE ON A TUESDAY NOT A MONDAY AS USUAL**

Next meeting
🗓 Tuesday 26th May, 2026
⏰ 6–8pm (please arrive a few minutes early to be shown to meeting room)
📍 Meet in the quad outside the Northumberland Building, City Campus, Northumbria University, NE1 8SG

First half of the meeting: selected photographers will share their work.
Second half: news, opportunities, and building projects to work on as a community. Please bring anything you'd like to share with the group!

👉 Let us know you're coming: sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/events/inside-may-meeting-2026

20/05/2026

📣 Calling all volunteers!

We're on the look out for helping hands this coming Friday and Saturday (22nd - 23rd May) to help in the AmberSide Collection Archive.

If you have any time and would like to help you can email us at [email protected]

Please use the subject line: "AmberSide Volunteer May 2026" and let us know your availability - whether it is a few hours or a full day!

18/05/2026

🎤 Taken alongside Bruce Rae’s Shipbuilding on the Tyne, these photographs show another part of the same lives.

The yards mattered. The work mattered. But people were not only defined by industry. These images take us after work, where singers took the mic, people joined in, and a night out had its own rhythm.

They sit alongside the shipbuilding photographs as part of the same social world: work, home, streets, music, humour and community.

📸 Contact sheets taken alongside "Bruce Rae: Shipbuilding on the Tyne", early 1980s © Bruce Rae (via AmberSide Collection)

16/05/2026

⚓ May 2026 marks 53 years since the oil tanker World Unicorn was launched from Swan Hunter’s Wallsend shipyard.

Amber’s film Launch, released the following year, documents the construction and launch of the vessel at a time when shipbuilding shaped work, streets, skylines and family life along the Tyne. Made on a budget of just £400, the film creates not only an authentic portrait of shipyard labour, but also the way in which the tanker dominates the social landscape.

Writing for BFI Screen Online, Martin Hunt describes how Launch shifts "subtly undercuts the established news treatment of such events, marginalising the VIPs that are conventionally the focus of attention, and shifting the political significance to the representation of labour and community."

More than half a century on, the film remains a record of a working river and the communities built around it.

🎬 Rent Launch Amber Films, 10 mins, 1974: sidegallery.co.uk/collection/launch-1974

15/05/2026

🏠 Today is International Day of Families, a UN day focused on how social and economic conditions affect family life.

Richard Grassick’s Unclear Family was made during the 1990s, when politicians in the UK were promoting narrow ideas about what family should look like through campaigns such as “back to basics”. The project pushes against that by photographing family as people were actually living it.

Made across County Durham, the Czech Republic, France and Germany, the series shows how family life is shaped by work, class, care, place and change. Grassick photographs people in homes, kitchens, shops and streets, staying close to the everyday realities that hold people together.

Explore more from the project: sidegallery.co.uk/collection/unclear-family-solo-show

📸 Unclear Family, 1990s © Richard Grassick

14/05/2026

🌊 David Cross’ "Play Boat, Westward Ho!" comes from his longform project "In Search of England / They Don’t Play Much Cricket Around Here Anymore", documenting contemporary England through colour and everyday landscape.

Cross grew up in Gloucester and discovered photography as a teenager before later founding the Centre for British Documentary Photography. Now living between the Forest of Dean and the North Devon coast, he describes Play Boat as symbolising “the ever changing coastline of Britain.”

Reflecting on the towns and coastline around Westward Ho!, he writes: “there is a transitory feeling yet in many ways they are constant... The coast has shaped me, taught me much about myself and the ecology of our little bit of the world.”

Feeling inspired by the places that have shaped you? Share your images with us and take part in MySide: Local Colour.
🔗sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/myside

📸 Play Boat, Westward Ho!, 2026 © David Cross

12/05/2026

💙 This week is Mental Health Awareness Week (11–17 May 2026)

To reflect on the importance mental health awareness has on many people's lives, we're taking a look at "Letters from Ernestine K" by Stefan Dolfen was made inside a psychiatric institution in Bethel, Germany in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Combining portraiture and fictionalised letters, the series explored how mental illness was seen, represented and experienced.

Dolfen spent extended time living and working within the community, building relationships with some of the women he photographed and developing the work through trust and collaboration. The series stays with the realities of institutional life and the people within it, resisting simplified ideas about illness, care and identity.

Explore more from the series here: sidegallery.co.uk/collection/letters-from-ernestine-k

If you or someone you know is struggling with their mental health, support, rights information and crisis resources can be found through organisations including Mind: mind.org.uk/information-support

📸 Letters from Ernestine K, 1980s-1990s © Stefan Dolfen

Address

5-9 Side
Newcastle Upon Tyne
NE13JE

Opening Hours

Thursday	11am - 5pm
Friday	11am - 5pm
Saturday	11am - 5pm
Sunday	11am - 5pm

Website

http://www.sidegallery.co.uk/, https://www.justgiving.com/ambersidetrust

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