Between 1975 and 1982, in the coalfields of Letcher County, Kentucky, where one-third of all families were living below the poverty level, Wendy Ewald worked as an artist in the schools, teaching photography and filmmaking to students, aged from 6 to 14.

Ewald released an extraordinary creativity, combining the magic of childhood vision and acute powers of observation. The world they present is small and intimate, but their perception of it is detailed, accepting and complex. This small selection from that body of work focuses on the children’s dream images. The full exhibition was first shown at Side Gallery in 1986 and is held in the AmberSide Collection.

Juvenile jazz bands began in working class coalmining areas of the North of England and the Midlands, with a few bands in the mining areas of Wales. They originated in the tradition of miners’ union marches and colliery brass bands. In the badly hit communities of the 1930s Depression, men without jobs or money and little prospect of either formed bands in an attempt to create solidarity and to provide themselves with a cheap, accessible and creative entertainment, in which their children were encouraged to participate.

Working at Side Gallery, herself working on a Manpower Services Commission unemployment project, in 1979 photographer Tish Murtha, developed a project on the resurgence of the Juvenile Jazz Band phenomenon. The project which took six months to complete, left her feeling far from complimentary towards its altered reincarnation. Murtha was also concerned about the right-wing political associations of the new form of jazz band and questioned the allocation of local authority grants towards what she deemed to be ‘poor substitutes for creative recreational activity’, particularly as they ‘reigned supreme’ in areas of economic and social deprivation, such as her native West End of Newcastle.

In addition to the official bands, Murtha photographed the small groups of children, who improvised ‘toy bands’ on the streets, many of them jazz band rejects. At the time, Murtha’s photographs and commentary were controversial, upsetting some within the jazz band community. Today they serve as an important documentation of a time, place and popular working class interest and form of play for many children in the 1970s and 80s.

The wish to photograph a dancing school may seem like a paradox, as the two basic elements of dance, music and movement, inevitably elude a stills camera. After Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s visit to a small dancing school in Tyneside.

After frustrated attempts to capture the atmosphere in straightforward documentary photographs, Konttinen made a series of photo-montages, which she conceded at the time were a more private trip into a fantasy than an insight into the dreams of others, and ended up taking jiving lessons instead of photographs.

In the early 1980s Amber Films made Keeping Time, an experimental drama growing out of Konttinen’s documentation of the Connell-Brown Dancing School in North Shields. She stayed on after the filming to continue her photographic project, resulting in an exhibition at Side Gallery in 1984 and a book of the work in 1987.

The realities of unemployment, poverty, racism, divorce and hard work are interwoven with the fun and excitement of the dancing school. The words and pictures open up on the importance of home and family, the hard-headed yet often humorous resilience with which difficulties are faced, the importance of the school as a female community, the women’s robust combination of romanticism and pragmatism. Konttinen intended the study to be an attempt at putting a finger on the troublesome, but compelling nucleus of female experience, hoping it would act as a springboard for both critical and sympathetic examination of female lives within our society, whilst also offering an insight into our own dreams as well as the dreams of others.

Chris Killip began photographing the seacoalers of Lynemouth beach, Northumberland in 1982, after nearly seven years of failed efforts to obtain their consent. During 1983 to 1984 he lived in a caravan, which Amber bought on the seacoalers’ site and also used to develop its first feature drama. Killip documented the life, work and struggle to survive there.

Seacoal came from the uneconomical coal waste which was tipped into the sea by the National Coal Board (NCB) from the Ellington pit at Lynemouth. The coal would separate from the waste in the water wash up onto the beach. However, quantity was very unpredictable and successful haulage depended on many factors, such as the tides, the wind and the amount of coal waste being tipped. The people who collected and survived off it, were at the mercy of these factors.

Killip’s images form a narrative of a small, unique, tight-knit community, where local seacoalers lived alongside settled travellers, and in which the work was intertwined with the lifestyle of those who were doing it. Entire families lived in the camp and children are strong presence, photographed alongside their parents on weekends and school holidays, combining work with play and making the most of their environment.

The seacoal camp has since been leveled and landscaped and is now an approved caravan site for Travellers. The Ellington pit is gone and with it the seacoal.

When McIntyre’s daughter Molly was born in 1984, it was revealed she was suffering from a muscular abnormality and the doctors thought it was highly unlikely she would survive more than a few weeks or months, most likely never leaving the hospital. In spite of this, McIntyre did take her home and Molly lived until her fourteenth birthday. In all of this time, her condition was never properly diagnosed.

Before the birth, McIntyre assumed she’d be able to combine her career as a photographer with being a parent. She did achieve this, but not in the manner she anticipated. Grounded in domestic life and unable to pursue the commissions she might have done had her child been more robust, McIntyre began recording the details of the day to day and found observing childhood fascinating. The first pictures were taken shortly after Molly’s birth and the last a few days before she died at home in South London.

Molly’s is a story that crosses all barriers of race, class and gender. Any family, at any time or anywhere in the world can find themselves confronted by the reality of disability. Having spent years fighting so that her child would not be socially and educationally marginalized by her physical disability, McIntyre is fully aware of how resistant many people are to engaging with such subject matter. This is not confined to disability alone – but to death, and in particular child death, one of the most powerful taboos – 16,000 children a year die before they are 18 in the UK.

This series of black and white photographs reveal a life full of vitality and the ordinariness of growing up, despite the challenges both Molly and McIntyre faced on a daily basis. An extremely bright and well-loved child, mature beyond her years, McIntyre hopes that Molly’s legacy is that she gave so many people the capacity to engage with life and to feel.

These photographs, taken in Crook, Willington and St Helen Auckland around the Millennium, come from Dean Chapman’s long-term examination of post-industrial experience in and around the towns and villages of South West Durham, which was ravaged by the pit closure programme of the 1960s. Developed between 1997 and 2005 as one of Side Gallery’s Coalfield Stories commissions, the whole project documents the continuities and social fractures within the former mining communities and their cultures.

The first stage of the project, shown at Side Gallery in 2001 focused significantly on the experiences of children and young people, their social interaction, play, hobbies and pastimes.

ROY

Duco Tellegen, Dovana Films, 2004, 29 mins

The film tells the story of a ten-year-old boy in a small Peruvian village. Instead of going to school he often goes to the local mine, where under extraordinarily difficult and dangerous conditions he attempts to extract enough gold to help lift his family out of poverty. It was made as part of the documentary series Living Rights.

TOTI

Duco Tellegen, Dovana Films, 2004, 26 mins

Toti is a Maasai girl of fourteen. When she was eleven, her mother told her that she was to be married and consequently circumcised. The cattle her family would receive from her marriage were badly needed. Having run away, and her twin sister having been married off in her place, three years later, she tries to reconnect with her sister and family. The film was made as part of the documentary series Living Rights.

YOSHI

Duco Tellegen, Dovana Films, 2004, 29 mins

Yoshi is a sixteen-year-old Japanese schoolboy who has Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism. Feeling caught between two worlds, Yoshi’s dream is to attend a regular Japanese high school. The film was made as part of the documentary series Living Rights, which explored the United Nation’s convention on children’s rights from the perspective of everyday life and intimate portraits of children’s lives.

NOHM

Duco Tellegen, Dovana Films, 2000, 24 mins

13 year old Nhom lost his leg and both parents in 1995, during the Cambodian civil war. He was subsequently raised by his aunt but in order to carve out some kind of future for himself, despite his handicap, he has to leave his younger brother and aunt to get an education at an orphanage in the big city. There, he is fitted with a new leg prosthesis, but battles loneliness and shame about his handicap until he befriends another boy who lost his leg, and they share their experiences.

ERANDA

Duco Tellegen, Dovana Films, 2001, 25 mins

Eranda (7) and her family fled the war in Kosovo. Her life as a refugee takes her from a Macedonian camp to a shelter in the Netherlands. Although she finds herself further and further away from home, the war stays close to her. Finally, they leave the Dutch shelter to go home, where an emotional reunion with her relatives awaits her.

MALAK & MUSTAFA

Duco Tellegen, Dovana Films, 2016, 9 mins

Two Syrian children, Malak (7) and Mustafa (14) give personal accounts of their experiences of journeying from their homeland to the shores of Greece.

Teenage Girls in East Durham

One of Side Gallery’s Coalfield Stories commissions, Robinson’s work was first shown in 2005. Over the previous couple of years she had approached, listened to and engaged with the teenage girls who regularly hung around the streets of various villages and towns of East Durham.

At the time, Easington District had one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the country. Many young people in the area were and still are "slipping through the net". Failed by the educational system, in communities ravaged by the demise of heavy industry, with few opportunities and a lack of investment, their own aspirations can often seem unrealistic.

When Julian Germain took his daughter to school for the first time in 2004, he realised he hadn’t been inside a classroom for more than 20 years. It brought about a reflection of that period, from infancy to the brink of adulthood, when school is such a fundamental part of almost all our daily lives.

Our school days are a collective, formative experience, a memory matrix allowing complete strangers to find common ground. Certain teachers, lessons, classrooms, homework, exams, friends, rivals, the uniform, bags, books, enthusiasm, boredom, moments of pride and success, of shame and failure and so on, are all entwined with the complexities of the wider world beyond the school gates and the physical characteristics of growing up. For most people, the recollections are generally positive, the experience regarded, at worst, as a necessary, as well as an obligatory part of childhood. For some, the experience casts a dark shadow over their entire lives.

Using a large format camera, Germain developed a process of making straightforward documentary records of the classroom spaces and pupils at the end of lessons, in the finest possible detail. He never tells the students how they should look but their precise placement is crucial as he tries to ensure that everybody is in clear view of the camera. Also, the exposure time is usually a quarter or half a second so there is a collective process of choreography and concentration in readiness for the moment the shutter is released.

Since 2004, an archive of hundreds of portraits has been created, featuring classrooms from all over the world. Occasionally, they are accompanied by statistics, additional layers of detail that photography can’t reveal about the pupils’ likes, dislikes, beliefs and opinions. The data is both serious and playful and the marriage of photography and statistics seems to acknowledge the partial relationship that both media have with notions of the truth.

The images confirm that the basic classroom model is the same wherever you are in the world, but they also reveal incredible variety within that space. At the vanguard of this diversity are of course the thousands of individuals portrayed, each one utterly unique. Photographs always immediately refer to the past but because these pictures are all of children and adolescents who have their lives ahead of them, implicit in this collection, with its hopes, dreams and uncertainties, is the future.

These are stories of children across the world, told through portraits and pictures of their bedrooms. When photographer James Mollison was commissioned to come up with an idea for engaging with children’s rights, he found himself thinking about his bedroom: how significant it was during his childhood, and how it reflected what he had and who he was.

It occurred to him that a way to address some of the complex situations and social issues affecting children would be to look at the bedrooms of children in all kinds of different circumstances. From the start, Mollison didn’t want it just to be about ‘needy children’ in the developing world, but rather something more inclusive, about children from all types of situations.

These portraits and stories are of just five of the many wounded children in this bloody conflict. They were taken in refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon between spring 2014 and 2015. Wiedenhöfer has documented the aftermaths of modern warfare in both Gaza and Syria. The media focus on the numbers of the dead. He uses his work to raise support for the injured, who are often forgotten, left in real need, enduring the emotional and physical impacts of war.

Smethwick emerged as an industrial centre during the C19th. Rows and rows of tightly packed terraced houses were planted on the surrounding farmland to accommodate the factory workers arriving on masse from the countryside. Since then, these modest houses have become the spaces of new beginnings and have been continually adapted and personalised to suit myriad lifestyles and homestyles. From the 1950s onwards the paths leading to these homes have extended further and further across the globe.

On her initial wanderings, Liz Hingley found Smethwick’s densely populated streets surprisingly quiet. Only a rich mix of smells seeping out from behind closed doors filled the silent air. Naturally when resources to make a home in a new environment are limited, food comes before wallpaper or even beds. The taste of home feeds both the body and the mind.

Posing the simple question, ‘What is your favourite recipe?’ from door to door, Hingley was welcomed into homes to join the preparation of personal dishes rich with meaning and memory. Conversation flowed over the kneading of family-size naans; it continued over the harvesting of herbs grown from seeds stuffed into suitcases; and while waiting for blueberry crumble to bake with a cup of Pakistani pink tea. Cooking and eating together drew out remarkable life stories and revealed the complex journeys that have brought people from 130 different countries (and sometimes from just down the street) to their Smethwick home.

Home Made in Smethwick was commissioned and produced by Multistory. Multistory is a community arts organisation located in Sandwell, in the Black Country, who invite photographers to make new work with, for, and in response to, the lives and experiences of local people. Multistory is grateful for the support of Arts Council England and Sandwell Council.