Close to Home: Baltic pairs Murtha's Newcastle with Ryniewicz
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- Baltic gallery presents "Close to Home," pairing Tish Murtha's 1979-1981 Newcastle photographs with Kuba Ryniewicz's contemporary images — exhibited together in the north-east for the first time.
- Tish Murtha's four collections — Elswick Kids, Save Scotswood Works, Youth Unemployment and Elswick Revisited — hang in salon style with one enlarged image per series covering nearly an entire wall; Murtha died in 2013.
- Save Scotswood Works integrates campaign bulletins, articles and letters with Murtha's protest photographs, with segments from Paul Sng's documentary about the photographer playing alongside the Youth Unemployment and Scotswood images.
- Kuba Ryniewicz, a Polish-born photographer who moved to Newcastle in 2004, shows new works alongside images from Daily Weeding, Cornered Study and Good Eggs, his Polaroids and prints glued directly to the walls with no frames.
- Ryniewicz's accompanying film asks present-day Newcastle residents what made them happy today; their answers about sun, breakfast and connecting with friends echo the spirit the review identifies in Murtha's subjects.
- The review judges the show unconvincing, arguing that Ryniewicz's playful, often staged images must bend around Murtha's stonking documentary history — pairing protest marchers on one wall with a guinea pig "snuggling into a man's hairy chest" on another.
- Wall text treats Murtha in factual, historical terms and Ryniewicz conceptually, while Murtha's collections are contained and Ryniewicz's are scattered randomly — differences the review says compound the lack of narrative cohesion.
Why it matters: Curators increasingly manufacture dialogue by pairing historic and contemporary photographers from the same place; Baltic's choice exposes the limits of that formula — Murtha's working-class documentary anger and Ryniewicz's cheerful imagery share Newcastle geography and an empathic eye but produce a tonal clash the wall text and layout cannot disguise.
