Keep Documentary Accessible: Donate and Support Side

Side: Documents of Working Class Life

Side is a lens-based documentary organisation rooted in the North East of England. We show the realities of everyday experience through photography and film, and we support artists and communities who work from lived experience. We carry this practice into physical and digital spaces through partnerships across our region, nationally, and internationally.

Since 1977, Side has focused on documentary that is grounded, accountable and shaped with the people it speaks about.

We also care for the AmberSide Collection – a UNESCO-recognised body of work made with and about working-class communities in the North East and beyond – and keep it alive through exhibitions, projects, education and community programmes that challenge how communities are seen, remembered and understood.

Explore the AmberSide Collection
T Dan Smith Slides: Scotswood Redevelopment, December 1962 © AmberSide Collection

MySide

Show us your side of life

We’re inviting you to share your life and community through documentary photography as part of MySide, and right now we’re looking for responses to the prompt “Moments of Change.”

Maybe it’s a building coming down, a street being rebuilt, or a shop closing. Maybe it’s a protest, a graduation, a birth, a farewell, or a return. Maybe it’s quieter than that. A shift in routine, a new sign in the window, something that marks a before and after.

We want to see how change shows up in everyday life. The big moments and the small ones. How places, people, and communities adapt, resist, or move forward, and what those changes feel like when you’re living through them.

Visit MySide

What's on

Explore more at Side

Support Side

When you donate to Side, you help us keep documentary practice alive where it matters most. Your support strengthens our exhibitions, projects and education work across the North East, and allows us to work with artists, young people and communities who use photography and film to explore their own stories.

It gives us the stability to build work that is collaborative, accountable and rooted in real lives.

Donations also underpin our care of the AmberSide Collection, keeping it accessible, active and embedded across our programmes. Your support helps us grow new display partnerships for this work, expand learning opportunities and ensure working-class experience remains central to how documentary culture is made and understood today.

All donations go to the AmberSide Trust (registered charity number: 1160760).

Donate now

Beyond the frame

Explore the people and stories behind our work

Coal Staiths of the River Tyne

Coal Staiths of the River Tyne

January 18th, 2026

Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen & Peter Roberts

Video, Interview

A new film by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Peter Roberts brings Dunston Staiths back into view as a working place, using 1973 photographs alongside footage of the Staiths today.
Side at Baltic

Side at Baltic

January 12th, 2026

Laura Laffler

News

Announcement about Side's future and how documentary photography will be more accessible in the North East than ever before.
MySide: Michele Allan

MySide: Michele Allan

January 9th, 2026

MySide

Interview

In our latest artist interview, Michele Allan talks to us about photographing crowded public events, from the Miners’ Gala to city streets, and what shared moments reveal about community & belonging.
Views From Around the World

Views From Around the World

December 23rd, 2025

MySide

Photo Essay

Discover how people around the world see their everyday lives, from the North Sea to Brazil and Iran. These MySide highlights share personal, grounded views of places far beyond the North East.
A Year of Transformation

A Year of Transformation

December 15th, 2025

Laura Laffler

News

A letter from our Managing Director, looking back at the past year and announcing the next phase of Side and Amber's future.