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Thursday 11am - 5pm Friday 11am - 5pm Saturday 11am - 5pm Sunday 11am - 5pm

Side Gallery

Dedicated to Documentary Photography since 1977.
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Side Gallery is committed to exhibiting the best in international humanist documentary, its concerns rooted in a long-term engagement with working class, marginalised and threatened communities in the North of England – and by extension with the experiences of those documented by some of the finest photographers working across the world. It is committed to preserving and making accessible these ex

traordinary bodies of work, whilst using them to inform, lever and sustain the new production that will continue to take documentary practice forward. Side is centrally concerned with visual narratives: the quality of the imagery; the aesthetic and moral questions that are raised; sharing visions of the world and the marginalised experience to which they are able to give such insistent power.

03/09/2026

🎒 Starting school is a big thing when you’re small.

As children head into new classrooms this week, we’re looking back at Markéta Luskačová’s "The First Year at School", shown at Side in 1989.

The exhibition looked at those first experiences of school through the children themselves: the vulnerability and excitement, the new routines, and the exhaustion of taking so much in at once.

🛒 Vintage posters from the 1989 show available from the Side Online Shop: shop.amber-online.com/products/the-first-year-at-school-exhibition-poster

📷 "The First Year at School" exhibition poster, 1989 ©Markéta Luskačová

02/09/2026

📣 InSide: Documentary Photography Community is back in September.

Bring work in progress, a question you’ve been sitting on, or a sticking point in your practice. Or just come along to hear what others are making and join the conversation.

The first half of the evening gives photographers time to share work and talk things through with the group. It is peer-to-peer support, not a formal critique unless that is the kind of feedback someone asks for.

The second half is a look in the AmberSide Collection archive, sharing news, opportunities, events and ideas, and continuing to build a stronger documentary photography community in the North East.

📅 Tuesday 22nd September 2026, 6–8pm
📍 Gosforth Civic Theatre

Find out more and let us know you’re attending: sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/events/inside-september-meeting-2026

31/08/2026

⏰ It's the final week of free Amber Films screenings at The Common Room for this summer.

Films from the AmberSide Collection are screening inside The Common Room’s historic Lecture Theatre: a fitting place to watch work shaped by industry, labour, community and North East life.

The programme includes The Filleting Machine, Dream On, and Launch, with stories moving from North Shields fishing families to launch of the World Unicorn at Wallsend.

Screenings are free and drop-in. On screening days, visitors can also explore archive material from The Common Room, including images from The Bell Collection and Coal Queens.

📍 The Common Room, Newcastle upon Tyne
📅 27 July – 4 September 2026
🎟️ Free

🔗 More info: sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/cinema/summer-of-discovery-heritage-on-screen

29/08/2026

🚉 176 years ago today, on 29 August 1850, Queen Victoria officially opened Newcastle Central Station.

But Central Station was not simply a new building. Newcastle was a city on the rise, and the railway was changing the scale and speed of the city, connecting Newcastle more closely to people, goods and industry across the country. John Dobson’s monumental frontage gave that new infrastructure a civic face.

These photographs from 1971 turn the building around. One looks towards the architecture Newcastle presented to the street; the other looks into the tracks, platforms and vast curved roofs that made it work.

Together they show Central as both statement and infrastructure: architecture built to represent a city, wrapped around the machinery that was helping to transform it.

Happy Birthday Central Station

📷 Newcastle Architecture: Central Station, 1971 ©Lambton Visual Aids (AmberSide Collection)

27/08/2026

🎬 Revisiting "What Happened Here?"

The film "What Happened Here?" begins with the Amber archive, but it does not stay there. Thirty-five years after the Miners’ Strike, Amber returned to Easington and worked with the community for a year, culminating in a Miners Picnic on 24 August 2019. The film brings photographs, footage and memories back into the place they came from, asking people to revisit what happened and what followed, before ending with the community gathered together again.

Heather Wood is one of the voices at the heart of the community's history. Chair of Save Easington Area Mines and a leading organiser during the strike, she helped build a network of support groups across the district and became part of Women Against Pit Closures. In this 1985 footage, used in "What Happened Here?", Heather speaks about what Easington had endured, but also what people had discovered through organising together.

Seen decades later, Heather’s words are no longer only about the end of the strike. They are part of a community story which is still being told.

🔗 Watch "What Happened Here?" alongside the digital event hosted around the film during lockdown in 2020: sidegallery.co.uk/blog/what-happened-here-blog

🎥 "What Happened Here?", 2020 ©Amber Films

26/08/2026

🚇 Before the Tyne and Wear Metro became part of the everyday landscape, Isabella Jedrzejczyk photographed the infrastructure taking shape.

This view of the Byker Viaduct was made in 1979, while the huge concrete structure was still under construction above the Ouseburn Valley. Built specifically for the new Metro, it would a few years later carry trains between Newcastle city centre and Tynemouth on the coast.

The photograph comes from Jedrzejczyk’s "Urban Landscapes", a 1979 series documenting Newcastle and North Tyneside through a period of rapid physical change.

🔗 Explore the series: sidegallery.co.uk/collection/urban-landscapes

📷 Urban Landscapes, 1979 ©Isabella Jedrzejczyk

25/08/2026

☀️ MySide: On The Move

Jump in, climb out, squeeze through the barriers, climb the bridge, repeat. During Paris’s June heatwave, Oscar Jenkins watched hundreds of people head to Canal Saint-Martin to cool off, with people launching themselves from the bridges into the water below.

Oscar returned the next day with his camera, capturing a playful routine of movement, repetition and freedom for our latest open call: "MySide: On The Move".

📷 "Canal Saint-Martin Diver", 2026 ©Oscar Jenkins

Show us how people move through your world. Submit your photographs to MySide: "On The Move" by 30 September.
🔗 sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/myside

24/08/2026

📰 “We’re occupied. We’ve been occupied by the police.”

42 years ago, Easington was the front line of the Miners' Strike. Keith Pattison’s photographs place women, children and family homes alongside picket lines, police and violence, showing what it meant to live through the Miners’ Strike, not simply witness it.

Our new blog looks at "Easington: August 1984" and what documentary photography can hold when political conflict enters ordinary life.

🔗 Read "Easington, August 1984: Under Occupation": sidegallery.co.uk/blog/easington-under-occupation

📷 "Easington: August 1984", 1984 ©Keith Pattison

21/08/2026

📣 This week’s Side Shout Out is a big congratulations to Hazel Plater, Pete Robinson and Andrew Pounder, who have all been selected for “BALTIC Open Submission 2026”.

All three are vital contemporary voices in our region’s documentary photographic community, so we’re excited to see their work included in the exhibition.

📍 BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
📅 19 September 2026 to 4 April 2027
🎟 Free entry
🔗 https://baltic.art/whats-on/v8D-baltic-open-submission-2026/

Congratulations Hazel Plater Photography Hazel Plater Photography, Eye of the Tyne Photography and

Want to be included in a future Side Shout Out? Send an image, your social media handles, and a short description of what we’re celebrating to [email protected].

20/08/2026

🎬 One night, two Amber dramas, and the words of one of North Shields’ best-loved writers.

This September, Side is joining Whitley Bay Film Festival for an evening celebrating playwright Tom Hadaway at Cullercoats Methodist Fishermen’s Mission.

Hadaway knew the Shields Fish Quay and fishing community intimately, and that lived experience runs through both films. Together, “The Filleting Machine” and “In Fading Light” trace working life, family, change and resilience in a fishing industry already facing an uncertain future.

“The Filleting Machine” (1981)
Adapted by Amber Films from Hadaway’s play, following the tensions within a working-class North Shields fishing family.
🎞️ 6.30pm

“In Fading Light” (1989)
Written by Hadaway, following a fishing crew and the relationships around them as the local industry declines.
🎞️ 8pm

📅 Saturday 19 September
📍 Cullercoats Methodist Fishermen’s Mission
🎟️ £7 per film

A chance to see two films rooted in the lives, language and experiences of the North Shields fishing community, screened just along the coast from where those stories began.

Find out more and book: sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/cinema/whitley-bay-film-festival-2026

Whitley Bay Film Festival

Address

5-9 Side
Newcastle Upon Tyne
NE13JE

Opening Hours

Thursday	11am - 5pm
Friday	11am - 5pm
Saturday	11am - 5pm
Sunday	11am - 5pm

Website

http://www.sidegallery.co.uk/, https://www.justgiving.com/ambersidetrust

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