☕ Submitted to our open call MySide: Local Colour, David Potts photographs The Rendezvous Cafe in Whitley Bay. A long-standing seafront cafe called by David “a place of comfort, laughter, solitude and company”.
📸 Submit to your photography to MySide: sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/...
🚸 Robert Munoz worked as a press photographer in the 1970s and 80s. But some of his favourite images came between assignments, walking the streets. The Child in the City brings together photos of children moving through everyday life, from Paris to Mariupol.
Explore: sidegallery.co.uk/blog/robe...
📣 LOCATION CHANGE!
InSide's April meeting has had a change of location - join us April 20th at Coffee Rooms, Tyneside Cinema.
Next meeting:
🗓️ Mon 20 April, 6–8pm
📍Coffee Rooms, 2nd Floor, Tyneside Cinema,10 Pilgrim Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 6QG
🔗 sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/...
🍳 East End Restaurant Chef, c.2007 by Larry Herman
From Waged London, looking at workers who keep London running.
Shown in Work & Workers (Side, Summer 2019), alongside images of labour from coal mines to call centres. Herman's image highlights how working life is changing in a service economy.
🏗️ New Exhibition: Planned Space Lived Place
Bringing together the AmberSide Collection and InSide: Documentary Photography Community to look at how Northern New Towns are shaped through everyday life.
📍 Farrell Centre
🗓️ Open until 28 August 2026
🔗 sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/...
📸 “I’ve only lived and worked in the North East for the last seven years, meaning that I am most certainly an offcomer, blow-in or (my particular favourite) an offcumden...”
Read our blog by Richard Simpson on photographing the North East as it changes: sidegallery.co.uk/blog/mysi...
🌱 Martin Figura, Horden Victory Club, 2000. Leeks, onions, cauliflower - proudly carried, ready for judgement.
Shared as inspo for MySide: Local Colour. We want to see where you live and your community in all its colour.
👀 sidegallery.co.uk/collectio...
📣 sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/...
🎸 Janina Struk, Washington in a Word…, 1984
Made in the new town of Washington, Struk’s series looks at a place finding its identity in the 1980s. This image of LSD shows one way that happened: through music, style and the need for young people to make something for themselves.
🏗️ Kevin Edworthy, Easy Does It (2024)
Blackett St/Pilgrim St during the redevelopment of the former Odeon site, now HMRC offices. A precise moment before the street settled into its new form.
📸 Want to submit your photography to Side? MySide is open: sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/...
🐰 Easter Sunday in Harlem, 1940 by Weegee.
Purchase this vintage poster of the iconic Weegee image, "Easter Sunday in Harlem, 1940". These posters are originals from 1985, produced by Amber to celebrate the project Weegee The Famous.
🛍️ Side Shop: shop.amber-online.com/produ...
📣 MySide Open Call: Local Colour
Show us where you live in all its colour. Front gardens, shop fronts, murals, washing lines, spring starting to come through, or the small details that make a place feel like itself.
🔗 Submit your photographs: https://sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/myside
📸 Join us! InSide is a meet-up for photographers working in documentary. A space to share work, ask questions, and build community.
Next meeting:
🗓️ Mon 20 April, 6–8pm
📍Meet outside the Northumberland Building, Northumbria University, NE1 8SG
🔗 sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/...
🧡 MySide: Moments of Change – Michelle Webster
Taken during her mother’s chemotherapy, Michelle Webster’s photograph centres on a red heart bracelet given by her father. Shared in remembrance and awareness.
🔗 Submit your own work: sidegallery.co.uk/myside
🛒 Laurie Wheatley was a South Shields-born, self-taught artist. His influence was significant, shaping Amber's understanding of working-class expression. When Wheatley died, he willed his negatives and prints, along with a number of sculptures and paintings, to Amber co-founder, Murray Martin.
🥩 Smithfield Meat Market is set to close, ending around 1000 years of trading on the site. For #MySide, James Sebright reflects on photographing the market in the run up to this end, working through fragments, closeness and the tension between past and present.
Read: sidegallery.co.uk/blog/jame...
👞 Today we're looking back at woking-class style with this image taken by Jimmy Forsyth in 1958. It catches a late-50s shift in young men’s style: with Teddy Boy influence still visible and the slimmer lines of early mod style starting to appear.
Explore more: sidegallery.co.uk/collectio...
⚓ In the 1980s, Side commissioned Bruce Rae to photograph shipbuilding along the River Tyne as the industry came under growing threat. Showcasing both the ships and the men in the yards, these images show history is not only industrial, but human.
Explore more: sidegallery.co.uk/collectio...
⚓ Tyne North Pier, 24 March 1902
This is an image of a local landmark mid-rebuild. The original Tyne North Pier had only recently been completed when storms breached it in 1897, cutting off the lighthouse. It was rebuilt to a straighter line from 1898, and this image captures that work underway.
📍 Tommy Harris photographed Consett from the inside. Made for the local press, his photographs record the public life of thesteel town through community events, local rituals and everyday occasions.
Explore more from the collection: sidegallery.co.uk/collectio...
📸 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/...
🌱 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/collectio...
🏚️ 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/mysi...
🚨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 meeting schedule.🚨
🔗 sidegallery.co.uk/whats-on/...
🌷 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 the ways identity is shaped between generations.
🔗 See more from the project : sidegallery.co.uk/collectio...
📸 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/...
⚙️ 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.
🚌 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/collectio...
🎬 Women Working, originally shown at Side Cinema in 1984, celebrated women’s labour and activism through film and discussion. We're resharing this vintage poster in honour of International Women’s Day.
🔗 shop.amber-online.com/produ...
🛍 All profits from sales go to the AmberSide Trust (1160760)
📷 Edwardian Portraits began in John Lawson ’s Whitley Art 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/collectio...