The Artspace Group Show: Youth
Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen
You are following
Follow
Finnish documentary photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen has lived and worked in the north east of England since the late 1960s, embedding herself in various communities in order to sensitively photograph what their lives are like. In 1969, Konttinen co-founded the Amber Collective with fellow students from London’s Regent Street Polytechnic where she studied film. The aim of the collective was to document and give voice to the working class and marginalized communities in the region through film and photography.
Upon forming the collective, Konttinen and her fellow members moved to Newcastle upon Tyne where she began her best known project, Byker, which focuses on the the working class neighborhood where she lived. Her black and white documentation poignantly captures the social fabric of a working class community prior to its disintegration at the hands of urban redevelopment. Some thirty years later Konttinen returned to focus on its new population using color photography. Over the course of six years, Konttinen formed relationships with the now widely multicultural residents of architect Ralph Erskine’s Byker Wall Estate and sought to convey their lives in a single photograph. The striking contrast between Byker and Byker Revisited vividly marks the complex nature of contemporary urban …
Finnish documentary photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen has lived and worked in the north east of England since the late 1960s, embedding herself in various communities in order to sensitively photograph what their lives are like. In 1969, Konttinen co-founded the Amber Collective with fellow students from London’s Regent Street Polytechnic where she studied film. The aim of the collective was to document and give voice to the working class and marginalized communities in the region through film and photography.
Upon forming the collective, Konttinen and her fellow members moved to Newcastle upon Tyne where she began her best known project, Byker, which focuses on the the working class neighborhood where she lived. Her black and white documentation poignantly captures the social fabric of a working class community prior to its disintegration at the hands of urban redevelopment. Some thirty years later Konttinen returned to focus on its new population using color photography. Over the course of six years, Konttinen formed relationships with the now widely multicultural residents of architect Ralph Erskine’s Byker Wall Estate and sought to convey their lives in a single photograph. The striking contrast between Byker and Byker Revisited vividly marks the complex nature of contemporary urban lives and the architecture that impacts them.
Solo exhibitions of Konttinen’s photographs have been presented throughout the United Kingdom as well as in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Slovakia, Hungary, and Mexico. London’s Serpentine Gallery, Tate Liverpool, and the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Turin, MIT’s List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, and The Light Factory in Charlotte have included her work in group exhibitions. Films based on her photographs have been screened at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in Los Angeles, the Goethe Institute in Washington, DC as well as at several venues in Europe including Le Bal in Paris.
Courtesy of L. Parker Stephenson Photographs
Born 1948
Hometown Myllykoski, Finland
Lives and Works UK
Education
Filmmaking, Regent Street Polytechnic Film School, London, UK
Permanent Collection
Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki, Finland
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
New York Public Library, New York, NY
The Side Photographic Collection, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK
Tate Modern, London, UK
Representing Galleries
L. Parker Stephenson Photographs, New York, NY
Works Available for Purchase
No works
