Gateshead – From Pyrenees to Pennines

We went back to Gateshead last week. What we hadn’t fitted in to our previous day out was a trip to the Baltic, to see the retrospective exhibition showing the work of Chris Killip.

Here is a man who dedicated his working life, as a photographer working exclusively in monochrome, to recording the ordinary lives of people living in disadvantaged communities, mainly in the North of England, and latterly the North East. He gained their trust by living amongst them, witnessing their communities, their friendships, their day-to-day lives. He assembled an unparalleled collection of photos documenting the effect of the economic downturn which devastated those communities, particularly during the 1970s and 80s. These photos remain as powerful today as they were then. You can read about this exhibition, and see some of the images he took, here. The account in this edition of the Guardian is of the same exhibition as we viewed, which was shown in London before moving to Gateshead.

Woman views Father & Son watching a Parade, Newcastle, Tyneside, 1980.

Woman views Scene in Skinningrove, 1984.

And I’m showing some of the photos I took as I spent time at the exhibition for this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge #265: Black and White or Monochrome.

And outside, it was business as usual for the Millennium Bridge, the Sage, and the River Tyne.

The header photograph shows visitors to the Baltic viewing the scene from an upper floor.

Our day in Newcastle earlier this week wasn’t just about people-watching. We’d come to walk the banks of the Tyne, weaving back and forth over at least some of its seven bridges. Let’s take a bird’s eye view of the scenes we saw.

This is what those pigeons in the header photo were looking for.

This is the Tyne Bridge, with just beyond, the Sage Gateshead and the Baltic Centre.

This young herring gull was inspecting me as I inspected him. He was tucked behind a railing just beyond that first planter.

We wandered onto the Swing Bridge, which luckily didn’t want to open to allow river traffic through. Its elderly wooden jetties provided the perfect resting place for gangs of pigeons.