Amber Online

Amber is a film & photography collective based in Newcastle upon Tyne in the North of England. Amber Films, Side Gallery and Cinema are all part of it. This website brings together a full sense of the activity, history and collections for the first time...

Current Activity and Amber Films are self-explanatory - both come with clips. The Side Photographic Collection is in Photography. Check out what's on at Side Gallery and Side Cinema. Find out about Amber History - we're 40 next May; buy our films, books, prints & posters at the Online Shop;

Side Gallery is supported by Arts Council England and Newcastle City Council.

Amber on the Road

January 2012 sees Amber - and in particular the films and photographs of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen - celebrated in Finland. Helsinki's DocPoint festival is screening Byker and Today I'm With You on January 25, The Writing in the Sand and Letters to Katja on January 27. Alongside these screenings, from January 24 to February 4, the Helsinki gallery Laterna Magica is exhibiting Captured in Amber, a retrospective of Sirkka's photographs (25 prints, drawing on Byker, Writing in the Sand, My Finnish Roots and Byker Revisited). Crossing the Gulf of Finland to Estonia, DocPoint Tallinn is screening The Writing in the Sand on January 27.

Meanwhile, moving on to France, February 8 will see screenings of Byker, Today I'm With You and The Pursuit of Happiness at Ecrans Britanniques in Nimes. From January 31 to February 25 the festival is exhibiting Sirkka's retrospective Captured in Amber (60 prints - Byker, Writing in the Sand and Byker Revisited) at Carre d'Art in Nimes. And then, from March 16 to 25, just up the road from Nimes, the Ales Film Festival will be exhibiting Captured in Amber whilst screening Byker, Today I'm With You and The Writing in the Sand.

Search Your Film Archives

Have a look at the new Film Archive section. Amber has been working hard with the BFI and the Regional Film Archives to develop a wonderful new search facility. From all of our websites, you'll be able search (titles, keywords, whatever) all our archive catalogues. Tick the 'Only with video content' box and you get a host of wonderful online films to watch for whatever theme you type in. This has all been part of the Screen Heritage UK programme and, for us, it goes along with the much more extensive cataloguing of our archive and the digital remastering of a number of Amber films... DVDs coming soon with Maybe (1969), High Row (1973), Six to Midnight (1974), Quayside (1979), Byker (1983) and The Scar (1997. And more to follow. So, a big thank you to the DCMS for providing the money, the BFI, Screen Yorkshire and NFM for handing the money over and all the film archive people we have been collaborating with over the last year or so.

Amber is a Monument: Official!

• Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen & David Dawson, Chair of UNESCO UK Memory of the World Committee

Amber's Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Graeme Rigby went down to London in early September for a reception at the House of Lords with fellow inscribees in the UNESCO UK Memory of the World Register. The narrative of Amber's films and Sirkka's photography was recognised 'as being of outstanding national value and importance to the United Kingdom.' Hosted by the Parliamentary Archives whose 1649 Death Warrant for Charles I and 1689 Bill of Rights were inscribed, there was a generous supply of fizz and some very fine smoked and salted almonds. And representatives of a humbling array of other archives, collections and documents recognised.

Arts Council Cuts

Sign the petition here

The Arts Council has axed Side Gallery as a revenue client in its ‘National Portfolio’. The reasons for the decision are:

1 The gallery is part of a collective and therefore doesn’t have a board;

2 The gallery needs Arts Council funding and therefore isn’t sustainable;

3 There are too many galleries dedicated to humanist documentary photography in Side’s geographical location.

This flies in the face of the fact that the collective has continued to deliver what is unquestionably the strongest cultural legacy created in the North East over the past 40 years. Unlike many Arts organisations, its egalitarian collective governance has meant Side Gallery has never approached the Arts Council or Northern Arts for a bail-out. It is the only gallery in the country dedicated to documentary photography.

Click here for a full response to bad decision.