Despite films and exhibitions celebrating working-class photographers, their voices are increasingly rare today
Lanre Bakare Arts and culture correspondent
At the end of Tish, the documentary about the photographer Tish Murtha, one of the lingering questions posed by her daughter Ella is how did this incredibly talented artist not manage to sustain a career in photography?
Murtha, who created unparalleled portraits of working-class life in Newcastle’s West End in the 1970s and 80s, has been “rediscovered” in recent years, but her inability to make a living in her lifetime not only haunts the film but also current photography – where working-class voices are increasingly rare.
“Primarily with Tish being a working-class woman and a single mother – that was the defining reason why she couldn’t sustain a career,” says Paul Sng, the director of Tish. “It’s much harder for women to progress in the arts to this day.”
In 2022, a study showed that the proportion of working-class artists had shrunk from 16.4% for those born between 1953 and 1962 to just 7.9% for those born four decades later. The research found that people who grew up in professional families were now four times more likely than those with working-class parents to be in creative work.
Sng believes that more should be done to help artists from working-class backgrounds, who might find it challenging, as Murtha did, to navigate the funding applications and institutions, such as Arts Council England, which enable artists to make a living.
“She should have been supported more; not everyone can write applications,” says Sng. “You can use video to apply these days but there are people who don’t have a mobile phone. It’s still very difficult for people like Tish to make it.”
Tish comes to BBC iPlayer at a time when there’s a boom in interest in working-class photography.
Along with the Murtha film there’s the Bert Hardy exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery; Leo Regan’s film My Friend Lanre, which charts the rollercoaster life of former Independent photographer Lanre Fehintola, and Johny Pitts’ After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024 is touring.
A working-class photographer who did sustain an incredible career was Bert Hardy.
Hardy – who was the eldest of seven children and grew up in a working-class family in Blackfriars, London – is arguably one of the most versatile British photographers of the 20th century.
He went on night raids during the Korean war, took images from within the Belsen concentration camp but also captured celebrity engagements and shot sporting heroes such as Sugar Ray Robinson.
But it was his work with Picture Post, where he covered all aspects of working-class life from mining communities and rural poverty to the diversity of Cardiff’s Butetown that is the most celebrated.
Karen McQuaid, the senior curator of the Hardy show, said: “He obviously had a huge abundance of talent but also knew what to do with it and was entrepreneurial and hungry for commercial success as well as anything else.”
Hardy also operated during a period where there was a proliferation of illustrated weekly magazines, such as Picture Post and Life, which had a circulation of more than 13m at its peak – something unthinkable now or even in Murtha’s era.
Pitts, whose exhibition features more than two dozen working-class photographers, says he wanted to give a platform to artists who sit outside the big institutions and also present a “messy” image of working-class life.
“These artists haven’t been given either a chance, haven’t conformed to upper middle class notions of what good taste is, or simply haven’t had the chance to build a network within that world,” says Pitts.
“[The exhibition] is not a sob story. This is, in some ways, a celebration of the tenacity of working-class photographers, but also just to show how stagnant mainstream photography has been.”
