Byker Revisited: Portrait of a Community

Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen

Book Overview

Forty years ago Finnish photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen came to Byker as a founder member of the Amber film and photography collective. Her photographs from the working class Tyneside terraced streets became an exhibition, book and film. Studied and feted across the world, the work was a celebration of the community that was demolished to make way for architect Ralph Erskine's visionary Byker Wall.

Byker Revisited is Sirkka's return to Byker. Since 2003 she has been building a new portrait of the people and the estate - opening up the richly complex, often transient and fragile nature of contemporary urban lives and the architecture that is part of the story.

About the Author

Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen is a founder member of Amber, a film and photography collective that formed in London in 1968 and moved to Newcastle upon Tyne the following year. 

Sirkka's Photographs are accessible at: www.amber-online.com

Reviews

"The photos and humour, ugliness and beauty, the casual and the formal of Byker Revisited, all conspire to reveal a world where we do not conform, where we do not have to simply be one thing, where life is complex and contradictory. That Sirkka has found this in this new book as clearly as she did in the old is why she is a brilliant artist".Lee Hall, writer of "Billy Elliot" and "The Pitmen Painters".

"Byker Revisited is a collection of intimate portraits asking us to 'imagine, if you were to put your life in just one picture, what would you have in it?' The images tell colourful, moving and honest stories of lives, fully lived, hidden, inside an urban flux".Natasha Marks, Narc. Magazine.

“Most of the most successful photobooks about Englishness or Britishness are those that examine a community or locality, often though the close links that the photographer has with the area. Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Byker Revisited is a fine example”.  British Journal of Photography.

“Expect a brilliantly honest and intricate gaze into the very heart of Byker, and the sometimes wonderful, always enthralling inhabitants that reside within it”.The Crack.

“The way it details how we lived and how we live; the passing of time and what changes and what doesn’t; and the sheer human warmth of it, makes it the kind of book you want to give to everyone you know.”  Ali Smith, Author.

“A body of work that does not merely ‘revisit’ Byker as the title suggests, but provides a wholly rounded picture of a place of which the Finish photographer considers herself an ‘unofficial ambassador’.”Ag.