Side Gallery

We've got a bluesky account! Find us @sidegallery.bsky.social. Excited to connect with you all there! 📸 bsky.app/profile/sidega…

📸 Ten years ago, Side presented the exhibition "Childhood: 1977–2016". As part of our digital archive work, the talk programme from that show is now online, with Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Peter Roberts, Liz Hingley, and Lesley McIntyre. 🔗 Explore: sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/exhib…

🌱 Today’s spring equinox marks the turn into a new season. Achange in light, atmosphere and weather. As Jedrzejczyk wrote in 1983, “The landscape is our heritage and our future. We can read the past in it, and if we protect it, it offers us a future.” 📷 © Isabela Jedrzejczyk

📷 Images of Youth in Cumbria In 1990, John Rigby worked with young people in West Cumbria to make portraits shaped by their own choices of dress, setting and pose. The result is a collaborative record of youth identity, self-presentation and place. 🔗 sidegallery.co.uk/collection/ima…

🏚️ The latest MySide blog from Side features Alison Johansson’s Tearing Down Walls, a photographic response to the demolition of Caledonia Road flats in the Gorbals, Glasgow. Paying close attention to the domestic traces left behind. Read more: sidegallery.co.uk/blog/myside-te…

🚨Due to strike action at Northumbria University, March's InSide meeting has been postponed to one week later than previously advertised - rescheduled to 23rd March. Keen an eye on our social media incase of any further adjustments to the schedule.🚨 🔗 sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/event…

🌷 Mother’s Day Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Step by Step began with a North Shields dancing school, but grew into something wider: a portrait of mother-daughter bonds, female closeness, and identity shaped between generations. 🔗 See more from the project : sidegallery.co.uk/collection/ste…

📸 Join us! InSide is a monthly meet-up for photographers. A space to share work, ask questions, and build community. Next meeting: 🗓️ Mon 16 Mar, 6–8pm 📍Meet in the quad outside Northumberland Building, City Campus, Northumbria University, NE1 8SG 🔗 sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/event…

⚙️ Elswick Works on the Tyne, c.1921–22. A locomotive is lifted by crane over the river, another waits on the barge below. River, bridge, machinery and people share the frame - a reminder that industry here as both outward-facing whilst still rooted in local labour.

📸 New MySide interview When the Gaza solidarity encampment was established at Newcastle University in 2024, photographer Scott Smith (The Bearded Skot) was there from day one. Working from inside, he built a record grounded in trust and daily life. 🔗 sidegallery.co.uk/blog/myside-sc…

🚌 Consett bus station, late 1980s, from Julian Germain’s Steel Works, made a decade after the town's steel works closed. The new bus station roof was made with Italian steel, an irony often noted when people talk about this period. 🔗 See more: sidegallery.co.uk/collection/ste…

🎬 Women Working, originally shown at Side Cinema in 1984, celebrated women’s labour and activism through film. We're resharing this vintage poster in honour of International Women’s Day. 🔗 shop.amber-online.com/products/women… 🛍 All profits from sales go to the AmberSide Trust (1160760)

📷 Edwardian Portraits began in John Lawson ’s Studio in Whitley Bay and resurfaced decades later when a box of his glass plates was found under a floor. An archive of faces and fashion, hidden for half a century before being shared again. 🔗 see more: sidegallery.co.uk/collection/edw…

🎞 In Fading Light at Hexham Library at the Tyne Valley Film Festival Amber’s 1989 film, written by North Shields playwright Tom Hadaway and made within the fishing community as the industry declined. 🗓 Mon 16 Mar 2026, 18:30 📍 Hexham Library 🔗 sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/cinem…

👀 Neville Hall, Newcastle upon Tyne. Built in the 1870s as the Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers, seen from below to catch details most people walk past, photographed in 1971. A reminder shifting your angle can change how you see even the most familiar places.

📸 Join us! InSide is a monthly meet-up for photographers. A space to share work, ask questions, and build community. Next meeting: 🗓️ Mon 16 Mar, 6–8pm 📍Meet in the quad outside Northumberland Building, City Campus, Northumbria University, NE1 8SG 🔗 sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/event…

📸 Let Us Now Praise Famous Women A vintage poster from the 1987–88 exhibition on women photographers in the U.S. government, whose images show life during the Depression. For Women’s History Month it’s 25% off with code March26 until March 31. 🛍 shop.amber-online.com/products/let-u…

🌊 MySide: Silver Coins by Joseph Wilson. From 2013–2021 he kept returning to Lynemouth’s industrial coast, where spoil, waste and everyday discard resurface with each tide. 🔗 See more: sidegallery.co.uk/blog/joseph-wi…

⛏️ 42 years ago, just a few weeks before the miners’ strike began, Bruce Rae visited Easington, asking what it meant for a place to be so closely tied to coal - capturing a portrait of a community on the edge of unprecedented upheaval. 🔗 See more: sidegallery.co.uk/collection/eas…

🧱 Exploring "Byker Revisited" In the 2000s, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen returned to Byker to photograph life in the Wall Estate that replaced the streets she showed in the 1970s. 🔗 See more: sidegallery.co.uk/collection/byk… 🛍 Buy the book: shop.amber-online.com/products/sirkk…

🏘 Terrace housing built at scale, industrial work in the distance beyond the rooftops. An instantly recognisable northern skyline shaped by proximity between home and labour. 📸 Terraced Houses, 1980 © Lambton Visual Aids