Images of the past hit TV screens

Mar 3 2010 by David Whetstone, The Journal

HISTORIC archive footage is the stuff of a new TV service, as DAVID WHETSTONE explains.

TELEVISION used to be a simple matter of a big box in the corner of the living room and a dizzying choice between two channels, each in black and white.

Back in those days the film and photography students who would become the Amber collective were getting to know each other in London and formulating plans for the future.

In 1969 they settled in Newcastle – at their current base at Side, just off the Quayside – and became the self-appointed chroniclers of a passing age of heavy industry and mass employment.

Over 40 years, the Amber/Side collective – with several founder members still in situ – have built up a priceless archive of still and moving images.

As well as taking pictures themselves, Amber/Side members have commissioned other great photographers from around the world.

Their Side Gallery, at 9 Side, has become one of the country’s prime venues for documentary photography. Films are screened at their Side Cinema.

Under the Amber Films banner, there has also been a string of feature films rooted in the North East and often featuring communities that exist on the margins.

They include some of the last fishing families in North Shields and the pit villages of County Durham, now all divorced from their original purpose.

Several Amber feature films have been shown on mainstream television over the years. But now Amber have gone into the TV business themselves, setting up a webcast service, SideTV, to share the visual treasures in their archive with a wider audience.

SideTV launched in September last year with eight channels and a schedule that changes monthly. Viewers can choose to view short and feature-length films, documentaries, dramas, talks and animations. Works from the archives sit alongside new productions.

The March SideTV programme goes online today and let’s leap straight to Channel 7 which puts the focus on one of the most charismatic photographers of the 20th Century, Weegee.

Born Usher Fellig in Ukraine, his name was changed to Arthur when his family moved to New York in 1909.

Working as a freelance photographer on the streets of his adopted city, he attained his famous nickname because of his knack (aided by a police-band shortwave radio) of appearing at crime scenes shortly after the corpse hit the deck.