Where to Stay

Sirkka-Liisa Roberts MBE, more well known as Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, is a celebrated Finnish-born photographer and founder member of the Amber Film & Photography Collective. Since the 1960s Sirkka has traced the social and industrial history of working-class communities in the North East with her seminal collections of documentary photography.  Sirkka is currently raising funds to publish a new revised edition of her groundbreaking study of mothers and daughters at the Connell-Brown Dance School in North Shields. We caught up with her to hear about this as well as her early years, working with Amber in Byker and North Shields and the evolution of her photography projects over the years.