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.
Please support Sirkka’s fundraising campaign to publish the revised edition of Step by Step: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dewi-lewis/step-by-step-2?ref=discovery_category&total_hits=14118&category_id=280
The following is an extract from the full interview, which will be available in the next printed edition of I Love North Shields on 1st June:
Step by Step
Many of Amber’s films highlighted women-centred themes that were close to Sirkka’s heart. After becoming a mother, she began a project at the Connell-Brown Dancing School in North Shields, drawn to its community of women and girls that she would find herself revisiting over an extensive period of time. “What I found so interesting about the activities around dancing was how they forged a bond between mothers and daughters – getting many of the mothers into dancing, too.” The Step by Step project, first published as a book in 1982, offered a unique insight into the relationships between young dancers and their dedicated mothers. “For me, as a photographer, it’s my most challenging and complex work to date, dealing with the dreams and realities of the women in a stark economic landscape, much the same as it is now.” The series fed into the Amber Films 1983 docudrama, Keeping Time, and was an inspiration for the writer Lee Hall of the 2000 hit film, Billy Elliot. The 2018 film, Still Here, revisited four people from Sirkka’s previous projects, including women who appeared in Step by Step and Keeping Time. Now as middle aged women they are shown watching themselves performing at classes as teenagers. “When the women came to the screening of Still Here at the Side Gallery, I just remember the laughter filling the gallery from top to bottom – they were laughing at themselves laughing at themselves in the film!” Sirkka goes on to enthuse about the new revised edition of Step by Step, set for publication later this year: “There are more images included that I had not yet found for the first edition. At that time I was having to make decisions based on small contact prints. Now that I’ve started digitising my negatives, I’ve unearthed so many more photos that I love. Also, everything in the new edition follows the women’s own narratives, for example the environmental images, how the advertising boards in their surroundings bombard their mental landscapes.” The quality of the images in the new book will be far superior to the original: “It will be printed in Italy by one of the best art printers in Europe.” The women’s characterful quotes will remain: “All their sharp observations and humour is there in their own words.”
Find more of Sirkka’s work at: https://sidegallery.co.uk/collections
