50X50: Side Fundraising Print Sale

Icons of photography offer £50 prints to support the future of Side and working‑class documentary photography & film

Ends September 14, 2025

The 50x50 fundraising print sale is now live, giving the public the chance to acquire affordable, high-quality photographic images while raising essential funds for the UK’s only arts organisation dedicated to documentary film and photography centred on working-class life, both in the North East and internationally.

Photographers, including members of the Amber Film and Photography Collective, such as Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Richard Grassick, respected North East practitioners, and internationally recognised names such as Sunil Gupta, Rankin and Sam Taylor-Johnson, have each contributed a single image that speaks to the documentary ethos that has underpinned Side’s work since 1977.

All profits from this sale will go to the AmberSide Trust (registered charity number: 1160760) to help fund Side’s ongoing community work, finance the continued care of the UNESCO-registered AmberSide Collection, enable future exhibitions and partnerships, and support continued public access to documentary photography in the North East.

Every photograph will be available in a limited edition of fifty copies, each priced at fifty pounds. These prints will be exhibition quality an A4 archival C-types, produced and dispatched by fine art printers Beyond Print.

Kenny Robson - Horden Victory Club, 2000 © Martin Figura

Caravan Kid, 2018 © Nik Roche

Documentary photographer Daniel Meadows said: The AmberSide Collection is an unrivalled archive of work, created through close engagement with the people of Newcastle and the wider region. The archive is full of high-quality works of international significance – Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Izabela Jedrzejczyk, Markéta Luskačová, Chris Killip, Graham Smith, (need I go on?); these photographers have created some of their finest works with Side, the North East, and its people. I am lucky to have some of my own photographs in the collection and I am proud to be part of supporting its future.

Celebrity photographer Rankin said: “When I started taking images I wanted to be documentary photographer. To show the world how I saw it. But making portraits taught me what really matters to me, people. Side gives that same power to communities, it hands them the camera and says, “your life is worth capturing.”

Laura Laffler, Managing Director, The AmberSide Trust said: “When Side closed its doors in April 2023 the response was instant and overwhelming. Thousands of supporters told us our documentary record of working-class life could not be allowed to fade. Their donations and messages sparked the #SaveSide campaign, whose momentum has since secured vital backing from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and other partners. The 50×50 print sale turns that public solidarity into something tangible: every £50 print is a vote for keeping documentary photography alive, accessible and rooted in the communities it serves. By collecting these images, people are not only taking powerful stories home; they are protecting a national resource for generations to come.”

Ellen Stone, Creative Director, Side said: “Side has endured because people believed that documentary photography, and working-class narratives matter. The 50×50 sale turns that belief into practical support: it will keep our community work active, and fund new resources and opportunities for artists that will question, provoke and inspire audiences in the North East and beyond.

No War, Citizens of our Time © Gary Calton

ARTISTS INCLUDE
Alex Schneiderman, Alys Tomlinson, Amelia Troubridge, Anne Helene Gjelstad, Bill Stephenson, Bruce Rae, Cheryl Newman, Chris Harrison, Daniel Meadows, Dave Jordano, Dorman Long Collection, Dorothy Bohm, Edmund Clark, Ellen Campbell, Gary Calton, Hazel Plater, Homer Sykes, Isabela Jedrzejczyk, Jacky Chapman, Jane Hilton, Janine Wiedel, Jim Mortram, John Davies, Lambton Visual Aids, Leah Gordon, Lewis Khan, Liz Hingley, Maria Maza, Martin Figura, Matthew Finn, Michelle Sank, Nancy Honey, Nik Roche, Pete Robinson, Phillippa James, Rena Effendi, Rankin, Richard Grassick, Robert Golden, Sadie Catt, Sam Taylor- Johnson, Sharon Bailey, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Sunil Gupta, Tessa Bynney, Tyrone Williams

The Wait if Over, 2025 © Maria Maza

ABOUT SIDE
Founded in 1977 by the Amber Collective, Side is an independent arts organisation dedicated to documentary film and photography. The UNESCO registered AmberSide Collection contains more than 20,000 photographs and 100 films that record working-class life in Britain and beyond. Side is part of the AmberSide Trust (registered charity number: 1160760) together they engage community, provide education projects, create public access opportunities for its archive and support practitioners who keep documentary practice embedded in the communities they serves: sidegallery.co.uk

The AmberSide Trust, through the project Transforming Amber: Building a Resilient Future, is currently supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Donations to support the AmberSide Trust can be made at: justgiving.com/charity/ambersidetrust

Heal, 2018 © Sadie Catt

Todd Hido: Intimate Distance, Over Thirty Years of Photographs, A Chronological Album

By Todd Hido

Publisher : Aperture

2025 | 320 pages

An expanded chronology charting Todd Hido's career, with ten years of new work.

Well known for his photography of landscapes and suburban housing, and for his use of detail and luminous color, acclaimed American photographer Todd Hido casts a distinctly cinematic eye across all that he photographs, digging deep into his memory and imagination for inspiration. Newly revised and expanded, Intimate Distance: Over Thirty Years of Photographs, A Chronological Album includes ten years of new work since the book's first publication, including breathtaking new images from his travels to Iceland, Norway, and Japan, where he brings both a familiar eye and an expansive new vision.

Though Hido has published many smaller monographs of individual bodies of work, this gathers his most iconic images, along with many unpublished works to provide the most complete and comprehensive monograph charting his career. The book is organized chronologically, showing how his series overlap in exciting ways. David Campany introduces the work and looks at the kind of cinematic spectatorship the work demands. And Katya Tylevich muses on the making of each of Hido's major monographs, "The photographs lead as far as human-made roads go. They reach the periphery of utility wires, footprints, and paths already taken." From exterior to interior, surface observations to subconscious investigations, from landscapes to nudes, from America and beyond, this midcareer collection reveals how his unique focus has developed and shifted over time, yet the tension between distance and intimacy remains.

All About Todd Hido

Nick Brandt: The Echo of Our Voices: The Day May Break, Chapter Four

By Nick Brandt

Publisher : Skira

2025 | 128 pages

The fourth chapter of the celebrated series The Day May Break by the renowned photographer Nick Brandt, featuring Syrian refugee families, displaced by climate change in water-scarce Jordan

This is the fourth chapter of The Day May Break, photographer Nick Brandt's global series portraying people and animals impacted by climate change and environmental degradation. The series was photographed in Jordan, one of the most water-scarce countries in the world. It features rural Syrian refugee families currently living there, whose lives have been seriously impacted by droughts intensified by climate change. Living lives of continuous displacement, they are forced to move their homes up to several times a year, moving to where there is available agricultural work, to wherever there has been sufficient rainfall to enable crops to grow. The photographs show the families' connection and strength in the face of adversity, that when all else is lost you still have each other. The boxes on which the families gather aim skyward, pedestals for those in our society that are typically unseen and unheard.

All About Nick Brandt

Ed Kashi: A Period in Time: Looking Back while Moving Forward, 1977-2022

By Ed Kashi

Publisher : Briscoe Center for American History

2025 | 344 pages

Photographer Ed Kashi’s passion is long-term documentary projects that immerse him in issues that need attention or people’s lives whose struggles warrant concern. He has had a lengthy and varied career with National Geographic and other major magazines, traveling around the world to tell visual stories.

Kashi’s archive, now housed at the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, houses many of his personal memories and the experiences attached to the creation of those images. More than a simple repository of images, the archive is a growing, thriving, and continually evolving organism, a living library with immense value.

Through his photography, Kashi has had an intimate, front-row seat to witness and record major events in history. His work has been a passport to worlds unseen, unveiling issues that need illumination, documenting history in the making, and capturing the human experience and the many awe-inspiring places in our fragile world. A Period in Time is a testimony to some of Kashi’s most memorable stories—people he has been privileged to observe and learn from and the places and narratives that have shaped his life, all captured one moment at a time.

All About Ed Kashi

Bruce Davidson: The Way Back

By Bruce Davidson

Publisher : Steidl

2025 | 144 pages

Nearly four decades of unpublished works from a master of documentary photography

Consisting solely of previously unpublished photographs, The Way Back is a deep dive through Bruce Davidson’s more than 60-year career. The book chronologically presents photos made between 1957 and 1992, showcasing Davidson’s exceptional versatility―from his earliest assignments to later seminal bodies of work including his yearlong study of teenage members of a Brooklyn Gang (1959), his extensive coverage of the American Civil Rights Movement in Time of Change (1961–65) and his breakthrough portraits of the residents of a single block in Harlem in East 100th Street (1966–68). Series such as Subway (1980) and Central Park (1992) confirm Davidson as a quintessential chronicler of New York City.

What emerges through this retrospective is Davidson’s overt sensibility and empathy for his subjects and his commitment to documenting them in depth over time. Unlike his peers who photographed historical events, Davidson focused on the people within these histories. Now, drawing near the end of his long career, Davidson offers this book as a parting look at his artistic passage, an elegiac goodbye as well as a requiem.

Bruce Davidson (born 1933, Oak Park, IL) became a member of the Magnum Photos agency in 1958; since then his photographs and photo series have been widely published to great acclaim. At Yale University, he studied under photographer Alexey Brodovitch and artist Josef Albers, the latter of whom encouraged him to pursue his work among marginalized people and communities. His artistic influences include Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

50X50: Side Fundraising Print Sale

Icons of photography offer £50 prints to support the future of Side and working‑class documentary photography & film

Ends September 14, 2025

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