Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Geordie beaches

Originally published 25 years ago, the revised and expanded edition of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Writing in the Sand from Dewi Lewis Publishing reintroduces the lively, eccentric spirit of Geordie beachgoers into the present. With a deft balance of nostalgia and immediacy, Michael Grieve writes that Konttinen’s photographs not only celebrate the quirky nuances and contradictions of working-class life but also reveal an awkward yet tender relationship with the beach – a place both distant and intimate.


Michael Grieve | Book review | 19 June 2025

‘The quality that we call beauty… must always grow from the realities of life.’ So wrote Japanese novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. The documentary genre embodies this and seldom are there photobooks to which I feel personally connected, but the ones that do resonate are related to my youth and the region of my hometown of Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK. Tish Murtha’s photographs of the working class districts of Elswick and Benwell, where I was born, are stark reminders of the streets where I played during the 1970s; I could have been one of those scruffy kids jumping out of the window of a derelict terraced house onto a precarious pile of mattresses. Photographs by Chris Killip of The Station (2020), an anarcho punk music venue across the Tyne River in Gateshead, a space I regularly frequented from the very first day it opened back in 1981, capture those spiky haired and familiar faces; a visual portal transporting me back to the frenetic energy and pungent odorous array of hairspray, soap, glue, and sweat. And now, Writing in the Sand from Dewi Lewis Publishing: a homage to the sandy beaches of the North East of England and the people who relaxed there, by Finnish documentary photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen. Photographs of places so familiar to me, inciting a myriad of archived memories including the Spanish City, an amusement park located near the seafront of Whitley Bay that I regularly escaped to while ‘nicking off’ school, eating chips and playing Space Invaders with my mates.

In 1969, before finishing her film studies at Regents Street Polytechnic in London, Konttinen moved to Newcastle upon Tyne and co-founded the Amber Film and Photography Collective, a group of concerned documentarians focused on capturing working class communities and the effects of the rapidly disintegrating industries and the distinct social and cultural identity of the North East. They believed in long-term commitments towards communities spanning years, to integrate as much as possible to achieve an honest representation. Konttinen exemplified this dedication. That said, since it opened in 1977, the collective’s adjunct Side Gallery has always had a hard time keeping afloat. But now it really is sinking into oblivion; as of this time of writing it is ‘currently closed’. The gallery is no longer supported as a National Portfolio Organisation by Arts Council England, which is a disgrace and though the commitment and hard work ingrained in the photographs will forever remain, the momentum of the Side Gallery will halt and disappear just like the communities its photographers faithfully documented, just as the writing in the sand.

There is wonderful footage from 1974 of a young Konttinen featured on the then popular BBC current affairs programme, Nationwide. The reporter is full of praise for Konttinen’s “remarkable collection of photographs” taken of Byker and the tight knit community of working class people who lived there. These Victorian houses in back to back terraces were classified as slums and demolished to make way for a new modern Scandinavian inspired urban design that culminated into the unique one-and-a-half mile long social housing block called the Byker Wall. The reporter is somewhat bemused about this middle class ‘girl’ from Finland who chose to live in Byker and who feels the warmth of the local community, describing the residents as genuine, gentle and worried that the very distinct social unity and character would be lost with people living in atomised flats of the Byker Wall. Such was the level of empathy that Sirkka felt towards the North East of England as she remained stoically dedicated to documenting the region to this day, with a remarkable level of intimacy and affection for the Geordies and their plight in an ever changing socio-political-economic environment. In an interview she told me that the collective “brought us together and served us well is our common goals. Our egalitarian constitution, self-determination, editorial control, creative freedom, sharing of resources, lasting friendships… We moved to the industrial north-east with the aim of giving voice to working class and marginalised communities.” The photobook, Byker, was published in 1983, and ranks as a seminal and important project in the humanist mode of documentary photography in the UK, and certainly on a par with Bruce Davidson’s East 100th Street social documentation of the inhabitants of appallingly impoverished living conditions in Harlem during the 1960s.

Writing in the Sand was originally published twenty-five years ago. The book features black and white photographs taken between 1973 and 1998 on the beaches at Cullercoats, Whitley Bay and Tynemouth – all in close proximity to each other. The beach is a concentrated space, a hive of human activity, and these photographs celebrate the eccentricities and odd juxtapositions of engagement. Most telling, especially photographs from the 70’s, and compared to today, is how the English working classes have an awkward relationship to the beach, wearing unsuitable attire for the environment; men smoking ‘tabs’ in their regular heavy twilled suits with trousers rolled up, cardigan wearing grandmothers, mothers and aunts allowing themselves the pleasure of feeling the grains of sand through their stockinged feet. A space to break free and let one’s hair down from the confines of the ‘hoose’ and drudgery of work. This is how it was. And somehow the beach equalises people, feral children turn upside down, metamorphose into mermaids and bury their dads with sand, lovers love and dogs go barking mad. In this uncluttered space people feel the sensuality of nature that allows the potential of unhindered free expression. The sea, sand and sky democratises an experience; the beach is a theatre of improvisation.

With humorous affection Konttinen’s observations embrace the energy and actions of quirky and intimate moments with absolute humility. Her distance is polite and her closeness is honest and balanced. This is photography of the humanist kind, and in skillful hands the emphasis is about the subject, not the photographer. With eloquence she captures the joy emanating from the gravitational pull to the sea, that place from which we crawled from the primordial soup. From time to time Konttinen punctuates the flow of pictures with quiet abstractions of sand, pebbles, seaweed and rocks, as if to accentuate the movement and perpetual cycle of nature, and put bizarre human presence into humbling perspective. Konttinen has a close affinity to these beaches. A few years ago we met at her local Tynemouth beach at King Edwards Bay where, with other women, she ritualistically swims, braving the north easterly weather even in the winter. She emerged fresh out of the sea and I photographed her portrait, wrapped in a terry towelling robe on that chilly morning before heading to the warmth of her home and a cup of tea.

The majority of working class people in the North East have endured a great deal of loss. By the 1970’s the industries of ship building, coal mining and steel manufacturing were virtually extinct and by the 1990’s had gone together with the communities it supported, and so began the onset of the grim reality of there being ‘no such thing as society’ anymore. Not to be sentimental about the good ole days of the working class as for sure it was always tough, but it seems the more we have the less we have; consumerism is an instant, addictive, gratification separating humans apart. Community, as Kottinnen prophesied in the Nationwide programme will be lost, and with it a sense of identity, dignity and bonding.

This is old school, classic documentary photography. Tony Ray-Jones, Homer Sykes, Martin Parr, to name but a few, spring to mind, all of whom focused on the peculiarities of the English at play. Konttinen’s project ended in 1998, and I wonder if such images could now be taken in our protectionist self-image controlled, hyper-ethical cultural environment. How refreshing to see the total absence of mobile phones and lack of homogenous, sweatshop clothing, though only a stone’s throw away as a common sight.♦

All images courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis Publishing © Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen


Michael Grieve is a photographer, Director of ArtFotoMode, Hamburg Werkstatt Fotografie (HWF) and lecturer at Ostkreuzschule in Berlin. In 1997 he graduated from the MA Photographic Studies from the University of Westminster and then proceeded to work as a photojournalist and portrait photographer for publications internationally. He was Deputy Editor of 1000 Words and a writer for the British Journal of Photography. Since 2011 he has been Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, Akademia Fotografie Warsaw and the University of Art and Design, Berlin, and currently teaches at Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie, Berlin. He is currently working on Procession, a project documenting the peripheral space between Athens and Elifsina, Greece.


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Top 10

Photobooks of 2022

Selected by Alex Merola

As the year draws to a close, an annual tribute to some of the exceptional photobook releases that caught our eye during 2022 – selected by Assistant Editor, Alex Merola.

1. Carmen Winant, Arrangements
Self Publish, Be Happy / Images Vevey

The book – as both medium and as subject – is probed to its expansive potential in Carmen Winant’s latest. Large, elegant but always “DIY” in feel, with its rough, naked spine, Arrangements is one of those books that is both specific and sweeping at the same time. For the once discrete and disparate tearsheets that bound it together – depicting Bikram yoga classes, beauty pageants, moonwalks, childbirth, tantric sex and the young Malcolm X – have been decontextualised to conjure wonderfully capacious constellations which, as a whole, wrestle with, and trouble, the notion of “theme”. Most admirable is Winant’s insistence on labour; inherent not only in the (ever-visible) tears of each page, but also in the collaborative networks that enable the making and sharing of a book, foregrounded through the detailing of the designer, printer, distributor and, of course, publishers Self Publish, Be Happy and Images Vevey on the graceful front-cover. Whilst this is a book that could have been subject to an infinite number of rearrangements still, the strength of the “arrangement” Winant lies in its courage: the courage to put something out into the world; something confounding and generous in equal measure.

2. Collier Schorr, August
MACK

As strong as the taboos it touches, Collier Schorr’s third chapter in the Forests and Fields series is over a decade in the making and well worth the wait. Her many revisions have resulted in an unnerving book, extending Schorr’s investigations into ancestral responsibility through the mythos of the small town of Schwäbisch Gmünd, a synecdoche for German history. A finely-calibrated blend of history and fiction, the sequencing moves through Polaroids picturing crucifixes, flora and androgynous boys, at their moment of ripening, in and out of Nazi uniform. Invoking the performative history of fetishism and uniform – with references to Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974) as well as August Sander’s portrait of Hitler’s guard – Schorr is clearly working with the reactions the young men portray when they are confronted with artifacts of the Third Reich. Her anachronisms are provocative and transgressive, but also intimate and cathartic, resonating further given that Schorr is of Jewish descent, while most of her subjects are not. It is commendable how Schorr has sought to uncover the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of traumatic history, inherited and imagined. Ultimately, this book does not lose itself to nostalgia, even if it is hinged to it. For the fleeting Polaroid frames land on the now, shedding light a war whose ripple effects persist.

3. Zoe Leonard, Al río / To the River
Hatje Cantz

Intended as a companion, rather than a catalogue, to its coinciding exhibitions at Mudam Luxembourg and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Zoe Leonard’s Al río / To the River is a real tour de force and totally befitting of this most ambitious body of work. Comprised of 2,000 kilometres worth of photographs, the first volume follows the Rio Grande / Río Bravo along the US-Mexico border through a nuanced weave of abstractions of whirling water, iPhone shots of digital surveillance imagery and documents of Leonard’s own path. Countering the mass media’s sensationalist portrayals of a natural river that is made to perform a political task, all the while exposing the topographical indistinguishability of its demarcations, Leonard’s “half-pictures” inconspicuously shift through different ground-level vantage points, geographical times, tempos and tones. The arrangements of photographs – alternating between standalones to groups of two, four or more – invoke a multiplicity that is perfectly reverberated in the second volume, wherein writers, artists and other thinkers ruminate on the fraught history of the river from their respective fields. The book is an anti-monument, developed through its repetitions and refractions: its emphasis instead is on subjectivity and embodiment; on the notion that taking a photograph is taking a position. After all, Leonard’s preserved black frames do not carry the weight of the world, but the weight of her vision, which in turn becomes ours.

4. Kikuji Kawada, Vortex
Akaaka

Evidence of Kikuji Kawada’s ability to make a masterful book has increased spectacularly with his aptly-titled tome. There are clearly elements of his great opus The Map (1965) contained within the DNA of Vortex, not least for the cover’s chilling allusions to the scars of war left on urban environs. Yet, Kawada’s extractions of the zeitgeist carved into the depths of Tokyo have taken on a fundamentally twisted form here, resulting in surely one of the most bewildering books in some time. Spending time in its company is an intense experience; with extraordinary energy and stamina, the claustrophobic, seemingly never-ending full-bleeds, packed with immense colours, contrasts and textures, plunge us into a strange catastrophe. Pulled predominantly from his vast Instagram archive – which, as curator Pauline Vermare notes in her accompanying essay “Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt”, feels like a “timeless conversation with a man of outstanding depth, soul and modernity” – Kawada’s visions have been augmented on matte paper, thereby summoning the impression of coming into contact with another’s memories – or indeed nightmares. The book feels like, in many ways, a culmination of Kawada’s lifelong mental-mapping, through which he has strived to find the “clues to the future and the whereabouts of my spirit.” Yet, one also feels his quest into the darkness of a sky from which the sun has fallen is but over yet.

5. Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well
Steidl / Moderna Museet

There are few experiences as ecstatic as encountering a Nan Goldin slideshow in its intended form. With that said, since her breakthrough The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985), Goldin has produced several books-on-films which have both eschewed and embraced the artist’s original vision for her slideshows. This Will Not End Well is a stunning culmination of all of them, and the first time we can truly appreciate, in one place, the breadth and depth of her work as a filmmaker. The book’s exquisitely-paced sequences are true to their sources; flickering glimpses of light, sinking deeper into the night. Whilst its filmic debt is obviously strong, the black spaces of the pages also remind us that Goldin’s slideshows are, too, films made out of stills. The statis of each frame is heightened here on the page, the result being a reinforcement of the artist’s use of photography as memoir, as preservation, as a talisman against loss. And now, in place of the soundtracks, one hears whirring, whistling and voices. They are different voices, all telling the same story: of passages in and out of addiction; of families lost and found; of romantic obsession until death. There is much pain and heartache to be found here – but also, when it is most needed, love, tenderness and strength.

6. Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Byker
Dewi Lewis

Dewi Lewis’ republishing of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Byker (1983), a very distinct and authentic snapshot of British cultural life during the 1970s, feels timely in this moment of heightened social inequality and reflection. It is of course a testament to the incredible depth and power of this body of work, which documents the Finish photographer’s deeply-lived encounters with the terraced, working-class suburb of Newcastle; it was amongst the steep cobbled streets and smoking chimney pots that Konttinen found home. Whilst Byker was destined for redevelopment and eventually bulldozed (along with Konttinen’s own house) to make way for the Byker Wall estate, the photographs do not actively court the reader’s sentimental responses. Instead, they bear an intensity of living and loving, of struggle, resilience and, above all, community. The photographs have been handled with tremendous respect, exemplarily reproduced in tritones and re-sequenced alongside local anecdotes, many of which are published for the first time. Although Konttinen’s introductory text yields wonderful insightfulness, sensitivity and wit, it is her eye that exhibits the greatest empathy. It is perhaps an empathy that only photography, with its ability to, even decades later, relay and multiply a human consciousness, could elicit.

7. Sayuri Ichida, Absentee
the(M) éditions / IBASHO

Looking for the ties that connect the photographs contained within Sayuri Ichida’s Absentee is like groping for Ariadne’s mythical thread, until one realises that the seeking is essentially its point. Though oftentimes elaborate, the book does not feel overproduced or too precious; it is a consummate piece of bookmaking, ranking amongst the finest and most memorable of the collaborations between the(M) éditions and IBASHO. Ichida has reworked the traditional category of elegy (in this case, in honour of her mother) to impressive effect, inviting a variety of viewpoints which can only be gained through act – or process – of feeling. Feather-light in one’s palm, the book is comprised of multiple Japanese bound gatefolds that house four-image sequences. They reveal urban structures, scenes from nature and Ichida’s own body, inverted in silver inks on black matte paper, eliciting an elemental, even ritualistic, experience. For all of Ichida’s emphasis on touch and surface, the book’s dualities – between positive and negative, exteriority and interiority – seem to constantly point, in a very visceral way, to something much deeper. In the strange, tense symmetries of worlds Ichida has sketched, what really comes through is the power of their being in a book: frail but immovable.

8. Samuel Fosso, African Spirits
Sébastien Girard

The latest gem to emerge from the printing workshop of Sébastien Girard is African Spirits by Samuel Fosso, a most enigmatic artist who, since his early experimentations in performative self-portraiture in his Bangui studio in the 1970s, has never stood still. Although it is, in design terms, a comparatively restrained follow-up to the dashing Studio Photo Nationale (2021), Girard’s decision to print Fosso’s legendary series as a newspaper-format risograph publication is characteristically wise, for here is a work concerned with the media, celebrity and the history of representation. Fosso references and restages (or moreover parodies) famous photographs – including mugshots, press images and studio portraits – of prominent personalities of 20th century Black liberation movements, the most iconic of which is Carl Fischer’s 1968 Esquire cover showing Muhammad Ali impaled by arrows, martyred as St. Sebastian. We also find Fosso self-styled as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, two principal thinkers of Négritude. Indeed, the posture of revolt – a voice of raising up, a voice of freedom, a voice for the retrieved spirit – propels these performances. What’s more, through his extension of photography’s role in the construction of myths – this book only the latest chapter – Fosso reminds us that what’s past is always prologue.

9. JH Engström, The Frame
Pierre von Kleist

Believing in man today is complicated; what is left to admire, desire or envy? There has been no shortage of meditations on masculinity in recent years, but JH Engström’s, which is entitled The Frame, stands out for its scope and sincerity. The daunting exterior of this black, almost bible-like, book belies what lies inside: three-decades-worth of portraits of the men in Engström’s life; trans and cis, naked and bruised, desperate and vulnerable, sometimes violent but never fantasy (someone else’s, theirs, his). Divided into roughly-edged chapters, which either begin or end with a portrait of the artist himself, the rhythmic sequencing is, whilst skilfully sustained and indeed thematised, totally unconcerned with the language or logic of a single, sovereign gender. On the contrary, these broken faces find themselves mirrored by the frost-shattered, ice-aged rocks of Engström’s native region of Värmland in Sweden, which bracket – or frame – this book, which is really more like a refracted self-portrait. The effect is startlingly existential. What Engström invites us to find is the anima within. This is, after all, what makes us human.

10. Meghann Riepenhoff, Ice
Radius Books / Yossi Milo

Volatility, tactility, mercurial, the sublime: these are the words that come to mind when perusing Meghann Riepenhoff’s exquisite Ice. Although it is delivered with an immaculate blind debossed cover bearing frosted imprints, the imagery within is anything but. By producing cyanotypes through an unpredictable process of physically tracing ice – in varied temperature degrees, water types and crystalline structures – onto photographic paper, Riepenhoff has clearly conducted herself with great integrity, putting herself at the mercy of natural forces in an era when human urges to contain the environment have caused unprecedented destruction to our planet. Because her prints are left unfixed – in a state of flux from the point of their conception – their being reproduced on the page naturally limits their inherent drama. Nevertheless, it is by way of the book’s cumulative effect that Riepenhoff successfully evokes the fluidity in the frozen. These are the words which title the beautiful text by Rebecca Solnit, who writes: ‘… there was the yearning of blue, which is itself the colour of yearning because it is the colour of distant things…’ Riepenhoff reminds us that they are also the blues that kicked off the photobook in 1843: the blues of Anna Atkins. How wonderful it is to see her legacy live on in such spellbinding ways.♦


Alex Merola is Assistant Editor at 1000 Words. 

Images:

1-Cover of Carmen Winant, Arrangements (Self Publish, Be Happy/Images Vevey, 2022). Courtesy the artist, Self Publish, Be Happy and Images Vevey.

2-Tearsheet from Carmen Winant, Arrangements (Self Publish, Be Happy/Images Vevey, 2022). Courtesy the artist, Self Publish, Be Happy and Images Vevey.

3-‘Mattias. Study for The Night Porter (1974)’ from Collier Schorr, August (MACK, 2022). Courtesy the artist and MACK.

4-Detail from Zoe Leonard, Al río / To the River (Hatje Cantz, 2022). Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain and Hauser & Wirth.

5-From Kikuji Kawada, Vortex (Akaaka, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Akaaka.

6-From ‘The Other Side’ (1992–2021) in Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well (Steidl/Moderna Museet, 2022). Courtesy the artist, Steidl and Moderna Museet.

7-‘Kids with Collected Junk Near Byker Bridge, Byker’ (1971) from Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Byker (Dewi Lewis, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis.

8-‘#207’ (2021) from Sayuri Ichida, Absentee (the(M) éditions/IBASHO, 2022). Courtesy the artist, the(M) éditions and IBASHO.

9-‘Self-Portrait (Muhammad Ali)’ (2008) from Samuel Fosso, African Spirits (Sébastien Girard, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Sébastien Girard.

10-From JH Engström, The Frame (Pierre von Kleist, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Galerie Jean-Kenta Gauthier.

11-From Meghann Riepenhoff, Ice (Radius Books/Yossi Milo, 2022). Courtesy the artist, Radius Books and Yossi Milo.