Vandalism on a Grand Scale is a collection of documentary photographs depicting the poverty and unemployment crisis in working class communities around the north east of England in the 80s.  These photographs are in some way a revising of her Youth Unemployment work.  After people kept requesting more copies of the Youth Unemployment book Ella Murtha, Tish Murtha’s daughter, worked with the British Culture Archive to release Vandalism on a Grand Scale.

Tish Murtha was a documentary photographer based in the north east of England. Her main focus in photography was to capture working class communities, particularly the youth that had become ignored by society.  

At a young age she found a camera in an abandoned house and her journey of photography spread from there. A lot of her work is focused on her family, friends and neighbours.  These are people she cared about and had connections to and you can see that in her work.  Rather than photographing strangers from a distance you can feel that she is also included in what is happening in the community around her.

There is a beautiful quote by Tish in this book.

“My use of photography and my approach to it is based on the conviction that the fundamental value of the medium is its capacity to provide direct, accurate and vital records of the conditions, events and experiences that shape our lives.”

– Tish Murtha Vandalism on a Grand Scale © Ella Murtha

In conjunction with this book the Baltic Gateshead also held an exhibition of her work along with Polish born Newcastle based photographer Kuba Ryniewicz that focuses on local communities.

This is a very powerful book. It does a great job of showing the despair that the youth in the 80s had.  They had no opportunities to create a life for themselves because of a government that seemed to not care about them.  The images in this book perfectly document that despair.  Streets covered in burning rubbish, people sitting in rubble, children playing in dangerous abandoned buildings.

One thing that did stand out to me quite a lot was not just the despair but also the boredom.  You can see in the eyes of these young people that they wanted to be working, they wanted to do something with their lives but they didn’t have any opportunities to do so.

The aimlessness of these young people is very prominent.  The government took everything away from the young working class communities in the north east and provided no way for them to find meaning in their lives.  Tish does a spectacular job at capturing these emotions partially because she is able to get up close and personal to the people in these photographs.

To some extent this book is very relevant to life today.  Whereas in the 80s the government was shutting down industrial manufacturing creating mass unemployment, today corporations are replacing people with AI.  Corporations taking jobs from working class people who would put their hard earned money back into their local communities creating a positive society for every one and instead they are being replaced by a computer just so some rich person can hoard their money like a greedy dragon on a mound of gold.

One thing I did notice in this book is that a few of the pages were blank. I know this is to create breathing room to show emphasis on only one photograph but personally I do find the empty space to actually be a bit distracting and somewhat a waste of space.

I’m also not a huge fan of double page spreads,  I tend to not like when a photograph has a seam down the middle, but to an extent I think I would have preferred if they made the images two page spreads rather than just have empty pages.  I know people would disagree with me on that but when you’re dealing with such a highly regarded photographer I just want to see as much of her work as possible rather than having empty pages in a book.

This truly is an amazing piece of work by Tish Murtha, she perfectly captured the struggles that youth in the 80s went through, partly because she was going through it and she could see how it was affecting her friends and family as well.

I would highly recommend that you get this book or at least borrow it from someone as it is a very meaningful and educational piece of documentary photography.

There is actually a lovely quote by Ella Murtha in the book that perfectly sums up her mothers work and the book itself.

“When we lose a working-class artist, we don’t just lose a photograph, a painting or a song. We lose a perspective. A truth. And that, to me, is not just a tragedy… it’s vandalism on a grand scale”

– © Ella Murtha Vandalism on a Grand Scale

Book by © Ella Murtha, photographs by Tish Murtha Published by British Culture Archive