Working the Landscape: Photographing Frosterley

In 1984, Darlington Media Group worked in Frosterley, a quarrying village in County Durham in the North East of England. The village lies in the Wear valley, where limestone has been extracted for centuries and used across the region, including in buildings such as Durham Cathedral. By the mid-1980s, quarrying was still part of daily life there, but the wider industrial order that had sustained the region was already breaking down. Across the North East, pits and heavy industry were closing or under threat.

Darlington Media Group were based out of Darlington Arts Centre, where cameras, darkrooms and training were shared. Working the Landscape: Images of Frosterley was born there, led by photographers Richard Grassick, George Dodsworth, Pete Maddison and Jane Greenwell.

Grassick had joined Amber Film & Photography Collective the year before. Since the late 1960s, Amber had built a collective form of documentary rooted in working-class life, rejecting the idea that one photographer, filmmaker or writer should claim sole authority over a place. Darlington Media Group came out of a similar culture in the North East, where shared production, community access and labour politics were closely tied.

This collectivism shaped how Frosterley was photographed. The work was made across multiple photographers, each moving through the village differently. No one account closes the place down, instead the project is opened up through accumulation.

That is not just a formal choice. It belongs to a politics of production shaped by labour history in the North East. Collective practice here is bound up with shared resources, shared skills and shared forms of making. In a region marked by mining, quarrying, steel, shipbuilding and trade union struggle, that way of organising cultural work carried its own political charge. The question was not only what was being photographed, but who had access to the means of making images in the first place.

Northern artist collectives answered that in practical terms. They were workshops, not simply credit lines. They refused the idea that documentary should belong to a lone author arriving to interpret a place from the outside and posited that shared resources democratised the means of production.

That makes a difference in Frosterley, where labour had shaped the land for generations and where the future of that labour was no longer secure. By 1984, quarrying remained, but without the confidence that had attached to industrial work in earlier decades, its future was uncertain.

The ethics of the project are bound up with that uncertainty. No one claim could be made on behalf of the village. Instead, the work refused to force reality into one vision. A place formed by collective labour is photographed through a collective practice.

Shared authorship does not solve the politics of representation, but it does shift them. Authority is dispersed. The work becoming less about authorial intent extracting an image, and focusing on about staying with a place long enough, and closely enough, for complexity to remain intact.

Now held within the AmberSide Collection, Working the Landscape: Images of Frosterley carries that weight with it: labour history, collective production, and a documentary practice shaped by access rather than distance.

42 years later, we are resharing this project because the questions it looks at around creation and representation have not gone away. As think about documentary practice it is as important as ever to ask: - Who gets to make images? Who has access to the tools? What kind of authorship does documentary privilege? And how can lived experience be photographed, especially when the future feels uncertain?