{"id":6912,"date":"2017-02-06T15:06:58","date_gmt":"2017-02-06T15:06:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=6912"},"modified":"2017-02-06T15:08:16","modified_gmt":"2017-02-06T15:08:16","slug":"tish-murtha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=6912","title":{"rendered":"Tish Murtha"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m not a fan of the Metro<\/em>, the free newspaper that litters our trains in the mornings. It’s useful if you have to wait for a train, to put underneath your bottom to sit on those cold metal benches, but otherwise I never bother to pick up a copy myself, and when occasionally I pick up a copy someone else has left on the train, a quick flick through confirms my belief that it isn’t worth reading. Which is what you expect given it comes from the same stable as the Daily Mail, a sorry excuse of a right wing newspaper.<\/p>\n

But for once the Metro web site has published something worth reading – and my thanks to friends on Facebook for point out Ellen Scott<\/em>‘s article Powerful photo series captures unemployed youths of Thatcher\u2019s Britain<\/a>,<\/em> about the work of Trish Murtha<\/em> (1956 – 2013), a photographer who lived the life she photographed in Newcastle’s west end.<\/p>\n

Murtha first used a camera to frighten away men who would proposition her on the streets where she lived, taking it out and threatening to take their pictures – even if there was often no film in the camera, but soon got hooked on photography and aged 20 went to study at Newport’s School of Documentary Photography<\/em> in 1976, returning to photograph in the community where she lived. Later she spent some time in London.<\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/em> published a piece written by her younger brother Glenn Murtha<\/em>, in their ‘That’s me in the picture<\/a><\/em>‘ series in 2015, and you can find out more about her on Wikipedia<\/a>, which also links to a number of sites with her work on them. She died suddenly of a brain aneurysm just a day before what would have been her 57th birthday in 2013.<\/p>\n

Her daughter Ella Murtha<\/em> wants to make sure that her mother and her pictures are not forgotten, and manages an official Facebook page<\/a> dedicated to her. She is planning to create a Kickstarter page shortly to fund the publication of a book of this series of pictures and her essay, Youth Unemployment<\/em>. I’ll add details here when they become available.<\/p>\n

My opinion about the Metro was confirmed by the two stories listed under the heading ‘MORE’ at the bottom of the piece which includes eighteen of Tish Murtha’s pictures.<\/p>\n

MORE: Photo series celebrates hard-working cats on the job
\nMORE: Photographer captures the weird and wonderful things people have flushed down the toilet<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m not a fan of the Metro, the free newspaper that litters our trains in the mornings. It’s useful if you have to wait for a train, to put underneath your bottom to sit on those cold metal benches, but otherwise I never bother to pick up a copy myself, and when occasionally I pick … Continue reading Tish Murtha<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,6,2,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photo-history","category-photo-issues","category-photographers","category-political-issues"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6912"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6915,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6912\/revisions\/6915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}