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
Can I Say Shalom?, 1990s ©Miriam Reik

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 “Ways We Celebrate”. Maybe it’s Diwali lights in the window, Bonfire Night with neighbours, Halloween on your street, a Christmas market, or New Year’s Eve with friends. Maybe it’s a quiet meal, a small ritual, or a moment of reflection. We want to see what brings people together and how we find joy, comfort, and connection in the places we share.

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

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.
Christmas in the AmberSide Collection

Christmas in the AmberSide Collection

December 14th, 2025

AmberSide Collection

In Focus

A look at Christmas in the AmberSide Collection, showing how people create warmth and meaning through small rituals across different places, lives and circumstances.
In Focus: Every Breath They Take

In Focus: Every Breath They Take

November 28th, 2025

Ellen Stone

In Focus

An closer look at Keith Pattison’s "Every Breath They Take", exploring women’s community care, collective action and the long fight against Monkton cokeworks’ pollution.
OFFSHORE ONSHORE

OFFSHORE ONSHORE

October 31st, 2025

LK Stow

In Focus

A 60-year photo story of exploration and the North Sea in the historic rush for ‘black gold’ by father and daughter photographers AJ Stow & LK Stow
Peter Caton: Unyielding Floods

Peter Caton: Unyielding Floods

October 23rd, 2025

Side

Interview

We spoke to photographer Peter Caton about "Unyielding Floods", his four-year project documenting how communities in South Sudan adapt to rising water and live with the reality of a changing climate.