Two North-East Photographers, Two North-Easts: Tish Murtha and Kuba Ryniewicz at Baltic

Two exhibitions opened at Baltic Gateshead this week under a single curatorial roof, and the friction between them is the point. On one wall, Tish Murtha's black-and-white photographs of South-Shields teenagers in the early 1980s — bored, kinetic, sometimes luminous. On another, Kuba Ryniewicz's more recent colour pictures of animals, children and the inside of his own home. The Guardian's three-star review, published 2026-07-03, called the pairing Close to Home and judged it a partial success: "there are many good things but they don't add up." That ambivalence is worth lingering on, because it tells a story about how the North-East of England now photographs itself.

The thesis is straightforward. Murtha, who died in 2013, made work that turned deprivation into something specific and dignified, refusing the easy miseries the London picture press tended to extract from post-industrial towns. Ryniewicz, a Polish-born photographer based in the region, makes pictures whose subjects look almost embarrassed to be photographed at all. Pairing them under a title about "the pursuit of happiness" is a curatorial wager that both registers describe the same place from different angles. The Guardian's verdict — three stars, "struggle for connection" — suggests the wager only partly lands.

What Murtha shows us

Murtha's contribution draws from her Youth Unemployment programme, shot in the early 1980s in and around South-Shields. The pictures are well known in the British photography world and have circulated widely since her death, which is part of why the Baltic hang feels less like a discovery than a stewardship. Teenagers lean against walls. A girl in a headscarf stares down the lens with the kind of unforced composure that would be impossible to manufacture in 2026. A boy holds a terrier that has, in the Guardian's reading, "struggled for connection" even within a single frame.

The point of these pictures was never sentiment. Murtha trained under Bill Brandt and worked as a freelance photojournalist before turning to documentary projects in communities the national press had written off. Her South-Shields work treats its subjects as protagonists rather than exhibits, and that ethical choice still reads as radical four decades on. Baltic's curatorial decision to anchor the show in this body of work is unimpeachable. The North-East has a complicated relationship with how it is pictured; Murtha is one of the few photographers who got the register right.

What Ryniewicz brings

Ryniewicz's contribution is harder. The Guardian's review describes a colour palette of muted browns and beiges, animals that look "cuddly," and a domestic atmosphere so quiet it sometimes tips into the inert. This is photography as consolation: a counter-image to the regional stereotype of bleakness, a deliberate softness. The risk of that approach is that the pictures can read as evasive, as if the region has been airbrushed out of the frame in the name of pastoral calm.

The structural argument worth making here is that the North-East is currently being photographed in two registers — the documentary inheritance of Murtha, and a newer, more interior mode that Ryniewicz represents. Both are honest. Neither is sufficient on its own. A show that proposes to put them in dialogue is asking the visitor to hold two different propositions about what this place is, and the Guardian's three-star verdict is a fair description of the experience: glimpses of something genuine, but no synthesis.

The counter-frame

The plausible objection is that curatorial pairings like this are judged too harshly. Ryniewicz's pictures may well land harder in person than they do in a review; the Guardian critic is explicit that "there are many good things" even while withholding a fourth star. The deeper counter-frame is that the regional press has, in recent years, tended to treat any photography of the North-East that does not traffic in hardship as a kind of evasion, while treating any photography that does as exploitation. Both instincts are understandable. Neither is a working brief for a curator.

Baltic, as an institution on the south bank of the Tyne, has spent two decades trying to balance its role as a contemporary-art venue with its obligation to a region that was promised much by cultural-led regeneration and has seen mixed results. A show that puts two photographers from different generations and different relationships to that promise is a sensible move. The execution, on the Guardian's evidence, only sometimes convinces.

Stakes and what to watch

The practical stakes are modest: Baltic will draw its usual summer audience, and Murtha's work will continue its long second life in the photography canon. The interesting question is whether the North-East's photographic self-image is settling into a stable two-track form — Murtha's documentary inheritance on one rail, Ryniewicz-style interior work on the other — or whether the next generation will find a way to make pictures that hold both registers in a single frame. The Guardian's reviewer is not optimistic. Neither, yet, is anyone else.

What remains genuinely uncertain is whether Ryniewicz's project, viewed at scale across a full retrospective rather than a Baltic gallery hang, would cohere more strongly than it does here. The reviewer saw the show as fragments. That may be the show's fault, or it may be the project's current shape. Either way, the pairing is worth seeing for the Murtha alone, and worth thinking about for what it reveals about how thin the consensus on regional photography has become.

Desk note: this article leans on the Guardian's 2026-07-03 review as the primary wire; the cultural-desk frame treats the pairing as evidence of a wider two-track shift in North-East photographic self-representation, rather than a verdict on either artist in isolation.