Childhoods brings together new work and work from Amber’s collection, creating a complex portrait of children’s lives and the social contexts they deal with.
The exhibition will move between North East England and the wider world, and will move across the four decades of Side Gallery’s existence.
“As well as exploring its themes, the exhibition is looking at where we are going over the next ten years,” says Kerry Lowes, the gallery team member who has curated the show, “it opens up on the connections we are making, new ways of working with communities and audiences, new ways of showing work at Side.”
It will include Julian Germain’s Classroom Portraits, developed across the world between 2004 and 2012, and James Mollison’s Where Children Sleep (2010), series told through portraits of children in their bedrooms – a way of revealing the complex situations and social issues affecting them.

The gallery closed in 2015 with Kai Wiedenhöfer’s Confrontier. For the new exhibition, Wiedenhöfer is contributing a series of portraits of refugee children from his new work, Forty Out of One Million / Syrian Collateral, which he has just shown pasted on to the Berlin Wall.
The exhibition also includes Liz Hingley’s previously unseen Home Made in Smethwick (2016). These intimate portraits of family meals and home cooked foods on offer in the ethnically diverse streets of Smethwick are accompanied by personal recipes, highlighting meal time’s importance in family bonding and defining children’s long-term relationship with food.
Commissioned by Multistory as part of their ‘Black Country Stories’ programme, Hingley’s series also gives an insight into peoples journeys to Smethwick, revealing another perspective on the migration experience.
Documentary has gone in and out of fashion and in again. The money has gone up and down. Side has kept going and the AmberSide Collection, which grows out of the group’s production, commissioning and collecting now holds some 20,000 photographs and 100 films.
More information is available here.
