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To coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the end of the national miners strike and the demise of the pits, Photofusion is delighted to present a selection of works from three of the Coalfield Stories landscape exhibitions, commissioned by Side Gallery. John Davies, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Simon Norfolk have documented the post-industrial landscape of the Durham Coalfield area where the last pit closed in 1993.
John Davies is internationally renowned for the lucidity with which he has tackled the rural and urban landscape through his refined black and white photographs. In 2003, Side commissioned him to revisit sites he had photographed twenty years earlier when he developed Durham Coalfield - a landscape survey of the working coalfield. Taking as near as possible the same shot as the original, the resulting exhibition of paired images entitled Signs of Coal, reveals a transformed landscape.
Having received widespread recognition for 'Byker', her seminal portrait of the terrraced Newcastle community published in 1983, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen has continued exploring concerns about community and landscape. In 1998 she began documenting some allotment gardens in Easington threatened by the regeneration work on the East Durham coastline. After the allotments were demolished, some of the ex-miners began to introduce her to the relatively inaccessible beaches upon which they walked every day; The Coal Coast documents the terrible beauty of mining’s legacy along the limestone cliffs.
This exhibition also welcomes the return of award-winning photographer
Simon Norfolk, whose solo show at Photofusion was instrumental in his being short-listed for the Citibank Photography Prize in 2003. In the same year,
Side Gallery commissioned him to explore the sites of attempted regeneration and the abandonment that can be found across the county of Durham. Taking its name from a 19th century dictionary of North East mining terms, Goaf documents locations of former mining activity and community culture in the Durham Coalfield. A new ski slope, an old music hall, a retail park, public art, the head-quarters of Durham Miners’ Association: each photograph carries a dual caption, one literal, one taken from the dictionary.
Side is part of Amber, a film and photography collective that has been engaged with working class and marginalised communities in the North of England since 1969. Coalfield Stories initially grew out of the research for Amber’s feature film Like Father. The work has, in turn, fed into the development of its new feature film, Shooting Magpies, to be released in January 2006.
Coalfield Stories has been supported by Arts Council England, Durham County Council and Northern Rock Foundation. |
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Top: John Davies
from the series Signs of Coal as part of Coalfield Stories
Monkwearmouth, 1983
Monkwearmouth, 2003
All images © John Davies
Left: Simon Norfolk
from the series Goaf, 2003-2005 as part of Coalfield Stories
Stow: To put stones and rubbish from falls requiring removal, or from stone drifts, or from where it is taken up or down into places appointed for the purpose
All images © Simon Norfolk
Right: Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen
from the series The Coal Coast, as part of Coalfield Stories
Hawthorn Hive. evening 8 August, 2000
All images © Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen |
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The three bodies of work in this exhibition were developed as part of Side Gallery's Coalfield Stories programme of new photography production and supported by Arts Council England, Durham County Council and Northern Rock Foundation.
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