Bringing Color to Newcastle

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When Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen moved to Byker, an English neighborhood in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, she was drawn to the laughter, the children playing in the streets, the energy. For her, this blue-colar community brimmed with life.

Then it was demolished.

The neighborhood’s younger population moved elsewhere for work; many of its older residents, with nowhere else to go, simply gave up.

Ms. Konttinen moved on, too. She took on other projects in northeast England, photographing the beaches, Newcastle’s Quayside, and a dancing school in North Shields. She returned to her native Finland for a year, photographing Scandinavian forests. Byker, it seemed, was tucked away in her past.

But she had left a set of her original Byker pictures â€" a semipermanent loan â€" at a community center there. “Five years later, I couldn’t quite remember anymore where I had left it, so I thought I better go and retrace! my steps,” Ms. Konttinen said.

In the intervening decades, things had changed. New immigrants, many of them asylum seekers, had settled in Byker. It was a bit of a shock â€" while many cities in England were experiencing waves of immigration from all over the world for years, Byker had not. Nevertheless, Ms. Konttinen was struck to learn that her photos were helping new residents connect with the old neighborhood that she had first photographed in the late 1960s.

“They actually used my work as the bridge for them to understand where they had come to and what the history of the place had been,” she said.

Curious, she attended a few local functions â€" capoeira, tai chi, volunteering at an asylum seekers’ support group â€" and was surprised that today’s residents had an enthusiasm for the place that was reminiscent of her own, 40 years ago. Struck by their excitement, she returned with her camera.

The newer photos â€" a rare instance of color in Ms. Konttinen’s oeuvre â€" eflect a more diverse community of immigrants and young families in their tidy, colorful homes. “Byker Revisited” is quirkier, but Ms. Konttinen’s approach has evolved.

She found that people’s attitudes toward photography had changed â€" a stranger walking with a camera is a bit more suspicious these days than in the ’60s, especially around children. In the old days, when the community was small and â€" Ms. Konttinen admitted â€" at times a bit nosy, it wasn’t long before she was well known in the neighborhood. But in the new Byker, Ms. Konttinen had to invest a year joining community groups and listening and collecting stories, before introductions turned into invitations into homes.

“The key, I think, has been that people get to know me as much as I get to know them, so there is a relationship,” she said.

As a result, she was more collaborative in this series, giving her subjects a say in how the! y present! ed themselves. She asked them: “If you have just one picture to describe yourself to the rest of the world, what would you have in it” She warned her subjects that even if she took hundreds of pictures, she would only use one to tell each resident’s story. She’d set up her lights â€" sometimes tricky in tight spaces â€" encourage them to put on their best dress if they wanted to, and wait with her flash for the right moment.

How she used the light was also a way to obscure the acute consciousness of class that characterizes British social anxieties. (Ms. Konttinen, being a hard-to-place foreigner, was not plagued by such anxieties.) “Often, if you go with the natural light and the fairly casual approach, you tend not to come away with stately portraiture, which is always afforded to the middle classes and the upper classes,” she said. “I thought it would be rather nice to offer something of a similar approach to the people in the humbler circumstances.”

Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen/Amber Collective Nancy-Jade, from Burundi, 2004.

Photographs from Ms. Konttinen’s original “Byker” series will be on view at the L. Parker Stephenson Gallery from Feb. 15 to May 11. Ms. Konttinen will also deliver a lecture at the International Center for Photography on Feb. 13.

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