SIRKKA-LIISA KONTTINEN | PRESS RELEASE

L. Parker Stephenson Photographs is pleased to present its second exhibition of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s photographs. The exhibition includes work from two series: The Hoppings, once Great Britain’s largest traveling fair and Byker Revisited, the sequel to a chronicle of a neighborhood transformed by wholesale redevelopment. After arriving in the northeast of England from her native Finland in 1969 (via film school in London) Konttinen, a founding member of the Amber Collective, set about documenting the region with her camera. She has done so for over forty years, earning recognition from UNESCO for her contributions to Great Britain’s national and cultural history.

An annual week-long summertime fair, The Hoppings, began in the late 18th century and continues to this day. In the 1970s, painted façades lured visitors inside dimly lit tents to view The Living Half Woman, Tom Thumb, a mouse circus or a wrestling match, daring knife-throwing feats and the Queens of Striptease. Konttinen’s interest lay in the surreal, the mundane, the unintended humor created by the entertainers and their hand drawn signs all of which were soon to disappear with the arrival of the modern carnival rides.

A more recent project, Byker Revisited, was started in 2003 close to twenty-five years after Konttinen documented the working class community of Byker in Newcastle Upon Tyne where she had lived. The original terraced neighborhood had been redeveloped in the 1970s, unintentionally displacing many of its inhabitants. Over the course of six years, Konttinen formed relationships with the now widely multicultural residents of architect Ralph Erskine’s Byker Wall Estate and sought to convey their lives in a single photograph. The striking contrast between Byker and Byker Revisited vividly marks the complex nature of contemporary urban lives and the architecture that impacts them

Solo exhibitions of Konttinen’s photographs have been presented throughout the United Kingdom as well as in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Slovakia, Hungary, and Mexico. In April of this year OCT-Loft in Shenzhen, China will feature Byker in its traveling exhibition and accompanying catalog on British photography since the 1960s: Work Rest and Play, Halfa Century of British Photography.

Her photographs reside in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the New York Public Library; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Finnish Museum of Photography. The most comprehensive body of work is located in Side Gallery’s Photographic Collection in Newcastle Upon Tyne. There are five books published on her photographs: Byker (1983), Step by Step (1989), Writing in the Sand (2000), The Coal Coast (2003), and Byker Revisited (2009). In addition, Amber has produced five films based on her photography: Byker, Keeping Time, The Writing in the Sand, Letters to Katja and Today I’m With You. These have been screened internationally including, in recent years, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Le Bal in Paris and the Tate Modern in London.

For more information on the Amber and its history, visit www.Amber-online.com

For additional information or to request images, please contact the gallery at +1 212 517-8700 or by email at info@lparkerstephenson.nyc.

L. Parker Stephenson Photographs, located at 764 Madison Avenue between 65th and 66th streets, is open Wednesday –Saturday from 11am-6pm.