Close to Home review: Murtha and Ryniewicz struggle to cohere
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Close to Home at the Baltic in Newcastle pairs photographers Tish Murtha and Kuba Ryniewicz, both celebrated for documenting their Newcastle communities from within.
- Murtha, who died in 2013, is represented by four collections — Elswick Kids, Save Scotswood Works, Youth Unemployment (shot 1979-1981), and Elswick Revisited — shown together in the north-east for the first time.
- Ryniewicz, born in Poland and based in Newcastle since 2004, presents new work alongside images from three series — Daily Weeding, Cornered Study, and Good Eggs — all shot within the past six years.
- The hang sets Murtha's Save Scotswood Works pit-closure protest images opposite Ryniewicz's portrait of a guinea pig snuggling into a man's hairy chest, a juxtaposition the reviewer calls 'tricky to join the dots.'
- Ryniewicz's accompanying film asks present-day Newcastle residents what made them happy today — answers about sun, breakfast and family that echo, the reviewer argues, the resilience visible in Murtha's unemployed young men.
- The reviewer's core criticism: despite equal billing, Murtha's 'stonking great chunks of history' establish the tone while Ryniewicz's staged, playful images 'have to keep up,' and the wall text does nothing to bridge the gap.
Why it matters: Close to Home attempts to anchor a contemporary conversation around Murtha's historically significant Newcastle documentary work — a worthwhile curatorial ambition, but the reviewer argues the pairing undercuts both artists rather than illuminating them. For Murtha's estate and Baltic programming, the verdict matters because legacy documentary photographers are increasingly framed against living peers, and this show illustrates how that juxtaposition can flatten rather than amplify either practice.
