A Woman’s Work at The Refuge

A Woman’s Work is a celebration of 20th-century female documentary photography through the work of two artists. Tish Murtha’s social documentary captures social change and everyday life on the fringes of society. One of the most pre-eminent British documentary photographers of the post-war era, Murtha documented the daily lives of the people in her home community of Elswick, a marginalised area hit hard by the decline of Tyneside’s once-thriving shipbuilding industry.

This is the first time Tish Murtha’s work has been exhibited in Manchester. The images on display are some of the most powerful images of British social photography of the last 50 years.

Also featured in A Woman’s Work at The Refuge is the work of Anne Worthington.

Worthington produced an incredible body of work documenting the inner-city communities of East Manchester in the early 2000s before the area’s post-Commonwealth Games regeneration. The photographs show the inner-city communities of East Manchester that had fallen into decline and capture the last days of these industrial areas, before and during the demolition that made way for new housing and businesses. The work focuses on the daily lives of people who lived there, and how they worked to keep their community together when so many institutions had fallen away.