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The Unclear Family project offers a diverse and layered portrait of family life across South West Durham in the early 1990s. Working independently but as part of the Crook Workshop, each of the thirteen participating photographers developed a personal visual response to the region, shaped through close relationships with individuals, families and communities. The resulting work reflects a broad interpretation of "family" – as something shaped not only by domestic arrangements, but by economic experience, generational ties, landscape and social change.
Photographers focused on subjects ranging from parenthood and childhood to ageing, migration and work. Some documented everyday rituals and routines; others explored more constructed forms of portraiture, shaped in collaboration with their subjects. The Crook series does not offer a singular statement, but rather a constellation of perspectives that together build a complex image of place and belonging at a time of uncertainty and transition in the Durham coalfield.
The first in a series of four workshops developed under the European Identities banner (1993–96), Crook 1993 brought together thirteen photographers from across Europe and the UK to explore contemporary family experience in South West Durham.
European Identities was a collaboration between Side Gallery (UK), Galerie 4 (Czech Republic), Lucioles (France), and the Ruhrlandmuseum (Germany). Organised by Amber’s Richard Grassick and based in the former Durham County Council education offices in Crook, the workshop built on a model developed by Galerie 4. Each photographer chose a town, village or theme in the surrounding area, producing new work through close engagement with local people and places. The idea of ‘family’ was interpreted broadly – as domestic life, generational identity, social bond and economic change.
The Crook workshop marked the beginning of Amber and Side’s extended documentary work in County Durham, following its five-year residency in North Shields. It was the first of its kind in the region and led to a number of longer-term commissions and acquisitions, forming an important chapter in Amber’s approach to collaborative, place-based storytelling.
