“For as long as I can remember my mam always had her camera around her neck, it went everywhere with her, like it was a part of her. She loved to develop her stuff, it was an art-form,” Ella Murtha writes about her mother, the brilliant photographer Tish Murtha (1956-2013), on a website devoted to her and her work.
Now, UK-Chinese filmmaker Paul Sng has made a new documentary telling Tish’s remarkable story. The film, simply called Tish and produced by Jennifer Corcoran of Freya Films, has been chosen to open Sheffield DocFest 30th edition’s next month.
Sng is in Cannes this week to participate in Friday’s Showcase Scotland event at Cannes Docs. The film is one of four Scottish docs-in-progress.
Tish was known for her tough but lyrical pictures of those living on the margins of UK society. Sng (who co-directed Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché with Celeste Bell) first became aware of her work through Twitter where he saw images posted by Ella.
“The first image I saw was of children on a council estate jumping from a second floor window of a demolished building onto a mattress.” Sng remembers. This was something he and his friends also used to do when he was a kid, growing up in New Cross (south-east London) in the 1980s. Sng edits photography books as well as directing documentaries. Ella was an admirer of one of these, ‘Invisible Britain: Portraits of Hope and Resilience,’ and provided a comment for the back cover about how much she liked it.
“We were in touch. We had never met. Then, Ella contacted me about the second book to recommend a photographer she knew. I just happened to say, look, would you ever be interested in making a film about your mum.”
Initially, Ella wasn’t keen. She had been approached before but guarded her privacy fiercely.
Ella and Sng spoke by phone and eventually met in Newcastle. “And then we were off really. One of the first things you need to do as a documentary maker is to ask yourself what is your right to tell this story,” the director says. Within half an hour of meeting Ella, he had realised that they were both only children. They had grown up in single parent families and both had been the centre of their mothers’ worlds. There was an immediate bond between them.
Sng was an admirer of Ella’s mum not just as a photographer but as a writer. Tish had written some remarkable essays. “She was fiercely political, very left wing.”
The director was introduced to producer Jen Corcoran, who is based in the north-east of England. “She is someone whose belief system, in terms of how you make documentaries not only creatively but around representation, we were in complete agreement with,” Sng says of Corcoran.
The next step was to launch a Kickstarter campaign. They quickly raised £45,000 and received further backing from Doc Society, Screen Scotland and the BBC.
“We shot it in the pandemic. That was a big challenge.”
Tish’s brilliance was widely acknowledged, but Sng believes she was held back by her working-class background. “Martin Parr is a white, male middle-class photographer often seen as a documentarian of working class people. He was, in a way, allowed to tell that story [of working class life] because of his privilege. Other photographers are often parachuted into these communities. In some cases, it could be a bit like a poverty safari.”
Unlike such figures, Tish wasn’t an outsider. She belonged to the community which she recorded on camera. As one of the interviewees in the film puts it, “to photograph the tribe, you’ve got to be part of the tribe. You have to dance the same dance.”
“Tish got those type of pictures because she was an insider. She was able to get very close to people and she was almost unnoticeable…but the other side of that, when you come from the background that Tish did, growing up in poverty, there are certain codes and patterns of behaviour that you have to observe to get on in the art world. That is very wrong.”
Sng comes from a similar background and talks of the “imposter syndrome” he has sometimes felt as he had made his way through the arts world.
“Tish refused to compromise. She refused to lose any of the integrity about her work and how it was used and made,” Sng underlines.
Some observers have suggested that Tish was “her own worst enemy” and that she could have been more successful if she had been ready to make occasional concessions. Sng disagrees strongly. “What makes Tish such a brilliant artist is that integrity and honesty. She was not only from the same background as the people she photographed but she protected them. She was concerned about how that work would be represented and defended it with all of her principles.”
British actor Maxine Peake provides the voice-over in the documentary. There isn’t much archive material of Tish but her writing provides a through line.
“There are pictures of Tish but not very many of them. When she was very young, they didn’t have money for things like cameras. There wasn’t any video or audio. I had the idea that we would bring her diaries to life through a voice-over.”
There are recreations of Tish in her ‘dark room’ (in fact her kitchen) and at her desk. These were shot in a specially built set constructed on the site of a disused Marks & Spencer store in Darlington. This had also been used for Ricky Gervais sitcom, Afterlife. Its production designer Richard Drew was a big Tish fan and allowed Sng to use it, reconfiguring it to match the exact dimensions of Tish’s kitchen and living room.
“You never see her face. She is shot from behind and from angles. That effectively brings Tish into the film as a presence rather just someone people were talking about,” Sng says of these reconstructions.
The aim now in Cannes is to appoint a sales agent (there is already strong interest) and to get Tish out into the world.
“Ideally, we’d like to do as many festivals as we can before we have our theatrical run which I image will be early 2024,” Sng says. The BBC broadcast will follow after the cinema run.
The other three projects within the May 19 Scotland Showcase are The Boy and the Suit of Lights by Inma de Reyes; Celluloid Underground by Ehsan Khoshbakht, and Loch Ness: They Created a Monster by John MacLaverty.
