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
Steel Works: 238 Hectare (428 football pitches) Landscapes, 1988/89 © Julian Germain

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 “Local Colour.”

We want to see where you live in all its full colour. That might mean spring flowers and gardens coming into bloom, but also the colours that shape everyday life year round: painted doors, corner shops, street art, workwear, bunting, market stalls, brickwork in evening light, or the faded details that tell you exactly where you are.

We’re interested in how colour gives a place its character. The bright moments and the quieter ones. The things people choose, make, grow, hang, paint, wear or leave behind. Show us the tones, textures and small visual details that say something real about your street, your neighbourhood, or your community.

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

James Sebright: The Body and The Blood

James Sebright: The Body and The Blood

March 24th, 2026

MySide

Interview

In our new MySide interview, James Sebright discusses his project The Body & The Blood, reflecting on visual language, and photographing Smithfield Meat Market during the slow process of change.
MySide: Tearing Down Walls

MySide: Tearing Down Walls

March 17th, 2026

Alison Johansson

In Focus

Take an in focus look at Alison Johansson’s project Tearing Down Walls, documenting the final days of Glasgow’s Caledonia Road flats and the traces of domestic life left behind.
MySide: Scott Smith

MySide: Scott Smith

March 3rd, 2026

MySide

Interview

For our latest MySide interview, Scott Smith, aka The Bearded Skot, talks documenting the Newcastle University Gaza encampment from within, and building a record shaped by care and responsibility.
MySide: Silver Coins

MySide: Silver Coins

February 26th, 2026

Joseph Wilson

Photo Essay

A photo essay on Lynemouth’s shifting coast, where coal, waste and sea collide. Photographer Joseph Wilson pairs new images with lost industrial archives to confront energy, labour and erasure.
MySide: Adam Monaghan

MySide: Adam Monaghan

January 28th, 2026

MySide

Interview

For MySide, Adam Monaghan reflects on his long-term work in Suvilahti, Helsinki, and what it means to document places shaped by culture, access, and change.