Jimmy Forsyth, who has died aged 95, was a remarkable photographer who documented the community that he lived in, on the Scotswood Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, in the 1950s and 1960s.
Forsyth was born in Barry, South Wales, and came to Tyneside in 1943 as part of the War effort. He had been at work for only four days when an accident led to the loss of sight in his right eye. After a period of convalescence he eventually settled in Elswick and set about trying to find work. He was unable to find regular employment, his days spent walking and reading about the history of his adoptive home.
In 1954 he bought a cheap camera from a junk shop and began taking pictures along the Scotswood Road. At first they were just snapshots – people he knew, places that interested him. Eventually he decided to try to make a comprehensive record of where he lived – he wanted to document the people who lived and worked there and the buildings and the streets that were being knocked down during T. Dan Smith's redevelopment of the west end of the city.
Widespread recognition of his photographs did not come until 1981, when he was discovered by Newcastle's Side Gallery, which mounted major exhibitions of his work. The publication of the book Scotswood Road in 1986, featuring his photographs, led to considerable acclaim and he received the Halina Award for photography in 1987. A biographical study, Out of One Eye was published in 2002, and earlier this year Jimmy Forsyth: Photographs from the 1950s and 1960s was launched; sadly he was too ill to attend.
Forsyth continued to make photographs in colour of his favourite subjects: the people he met on his walks and the extensive development of the largely Victorian city into the modern conurbation it is today, but this later work has yet to attract widespread appreciation. In the 1990s, a grant helped Tyne and Wear Archives in the acquisition and conservation of Forsyth's fragile and extensive archive. Forsyth, always generous, remarked: "It's no good burying the pictures. They should be given out to more people, and they should be free, after all they belong to their subjects, to the people themselves."
His best photographs from the 1950s and 1960s, in black and white, and taken with a 20-year-old Rolleiflex camera, have already become part of the history of the west end of Newcastle. However, it is the humanity of his subjects that shines through his photographs; despite their circumstances they remain steadfast in the face of what life has thrown at them. The intimacy of these photographs is a rare achievement – they are a record of a vanished community, seen and photographed from within.
Information from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/jimmy-forsyth-photographer-who-chronicled-the-lives-of-the-scotswood-road-community-in-newcastle-1760732.html
"I came up to Newcastle in 1943. They were shouting for fitters at Prudhoe, so I volunteered, and came down here from Glasgow, where I'd been working for two or three months. I lived in Barry in Wales. But after that I never went back. If it wasn’t for my accident I’d probably never have photographed Scotswood Road. I was in the boilerhouse at Prudhoe when a piece of chisel broke off and caught my pupil, they tried to save the eye but the cut was too deep. I never worked again. Plans were in the air for knocking Scotswood Road down. When they knocked down the Infirmary in 1954 a curious crowd gathered to watch. It was then that I realised someone should make a record of what was left of the community. For posterity’s sake. I had nothing to do, why not make a record of Scottie Road to pass the time? It would show future generations what we looked like and how we lived.
I wonder how I ever made the pictures, I was only on a couple of pounds Assistance then. Anyway, I picked up a cheap folding camera in one of the pawn shops. There wasn’t much to adjust, just as well, because I’ve never known what to do. I still can’t understand exposures and things like depth of field after all these years, not really. I’m just an amateur, I was never interested in photography, not really. When you’re taking a photography you’re recording something that will never happen again, catching a moment in time, I was just capturing what I knew was going to disappear. People say to me today, “How did you get all those fancy shades?” but I wasn’t looking or fancy shades, I was just taking what was there, the things I was interested in and the things I liked, and tried to make them look real. All the developing was done at the chemist’s. I could only afford contact prints. I had to wait twenty years before I ever saw the negatives enlarged or printed properly."
Quote from http://www.amber-online.com/exhibitions/scotswood-road/detail
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