NYAB Event - Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen "Byker"

Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen "Byker"

L. Parker Stephenson Photographs

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Born in Finland in 1948, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen has lived and worked in the North East of England since the late 1960s. In 2011, UNESCO recognized Konttinen’s photographs and her collective, Amber’s, films as being of “outstanding national value and importance to the United Kingdom” and inscribed them in the UK Memory of the World Register. The present exhibition marks the first time her work has been shown in a commercial gallery.

The Byker project focuses on a terraced district in the city of Newcastle upon Tyne that gives its name to the series and where Konttinen lived from 1969 to 1976. Her documentation sensitively and poignantly captures the social fabric of a working class community prior to its disintegration at the hands of urban redevelopment (in this case in the form of Ralph Erskine’s Byker Wall Estate). Byker was not only the subject of Konttinen’s first major project but also a place she returned to some thirty years later to focus on its new population using color photography.

Konttinen co-founded the Amber Collective in 1969 with fellow students from London’s Regent Street Polytechnic where she studied film. The aim of the Collective, based in Newcastle, was to document and give voice to the working class and marginalized communities in the region through film and photography. Forty-four years later, with its Side Gallery dedicated to exhibiting social documentary work, an archive of photographic commissions, and some fifty films to its name, Amber continues to pursue its original mission.

Solo exhibitions of Konttinen’s photographs have been presented throughout the United Kingdom as well as in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Slovakia, Hungary, and Mexico. In 1980, an exhibition of the Byker series toured China. London’s Serpentine Gallery, Tate Liverpool and the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Turin have included her work in group exhibitions. In the United States, MIT’s List Visual Arts Center and The Light Factory included her in a 1982 exhibition titled Ten British Photographers. In 2012, films based on her photographs were screened at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Goethe Institute in Washington, DC as well as at several venues in Europe including Le Bal in Paris. Most recently, her photographs were highlighted in the Photo50 exhibition at last month’s London Art Fair.

[Image: Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen "W.H. Douglas-Gents Hairdresser" (1974)]