At the end of Tish, the documentary about the photographer Tish Murtha, one of the lingering questions posed by her daughter Ella is how did this incredibly talented artist not manage to sustain a career in photography?

Murtha, who created unparalleled portraits of working-class life in Newcastle’s West End in the 1970s and 80s, has been “rediscovered” in recent years, but her inability to make a living in her lifetime not only haunts the film but also current photography – where working-class voices are increasingly rare.

“Primarily with Tish being a working-class woman and a single mother – that was the defining reason why she couldn’t sustain a career,” says Paul Sng, the director of Tish. “It’s much harder for women to progress in the arts to this day.”

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In 2022, a study showed that the proportion of working-class artists had shrunk from 16.4% for those born between 1953 and 1962 to just 7.9% for those born four decades later. The research found that people who grew up in professional families were now four times more likely than those with working-class parents to be in creative work.

Sng believes that more should be done to help artists from working-class backgrounds, who might find it challenging, as Murtha did, to navigate the funding applications and institutions, such as Arts Council England, which enable artists to make a living.

“She should have been supported more; not everyone can write applications,” says Sng. “You can use video to apply these days but there are people who don’t have a mobile phone. It’s still very difficult for people like Tish to make it.”

Tish comes to BBC iPlayer at a time when there’s a boom in interest in working-class photography.

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Along with the Murtha film there’s the Bert Hardy exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery; Leo Regan’s film My Friend Lanre, which charts the rollercoaster life of former Independent photographer Lanre Fehintola, and Johny Pitts’ After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024 is touring.

A working-class photographer who did sustain an incredible career was Bert Hardy.

Hardy – who was the eldest of seven children and grew up in a working-class family in Blackfriars, London – is arguably one of the most versatile British photographers of the 20th century.

He went on night raids during the Korean war, took images from within the Belsen concentration camp but also captured celebrity engagements and shot sporting heroes such as Sugar Ray Robinson.

But it was his work with Picture Post, where he covered all aspects of working-class life from mining communities and rural poverty to the diversity of Cardiff’s Butetown that is the most celebrated.

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Karen McQuaid, the senior curator of the Hardy show, said: “He obviously had a huge abundance of talent but also knew what to do with it and was entrepreneurial and hungry for commercial success as well as anything else.”

Hardy also operated during a period where there was a proliferation of illustrated weekly magazines, such as Picture Post and Life, which had a circulation of more than 13m at its peak – something unthinkable now or even in Murtha’s era.

Pitts, whose exhibition features more than two dozen working-class photographers, says he wanted to give a platform to artists who sit outside the big institutions and also present a “messy” image of working-class life.

“These artists haven’t been given either a chance, haven’t conformed to upper middle class notions of what good taste is, or simply haven’t had the chance to build a network within that world,” says Pitts.

“[The exhibition] is not a sob story. This is, in some ways, a celebration of the tenacity of working-class photographers, but also just to show how stagnant mainstream photography has been.”

It is one of the most recognisable images of the surrealist movement: a black-and-white photograph by Man Ray of Kiki de Montparnasse with f-shaped sound holes painted on her back representing a violin.

Le Violon d’Ingres, which was produced in 1924 and signed by the US artist, set a record for the most expensive photograph when it sold for $12.4m (£9.8m) at auction in New York in 2022.

One of three prints made in 1970 from the original negative will go under the hammer in Paris on Thursday as part of an auction of 200 Man Ray works covering all aspects of his creative production from a collection of one of his close friends.

Elodie Morel-Bazin, the European head of photography at the auctioneers Christie’s, said the range of the work on sale was “marvellous”, adding: “There isn’t any other complete collections representing the whole range of Man Ray’s work like this and it’s the first to be sold by someone who actually knew him.”

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She said lot 338, the Violon d’Ingres print, which has been given a catalogue estimate of €40,000-€60,000 (£34,200-£51,400), was produced under the supervision of Man Ray.

“He wanted to use a different technique so it’s completely different from the 1924 vintage print but is still one of the most iconic images in the world,” Morel-Bazin said.

Other photographs being sold include several self-portraits and others featuring major literary and artistic figures including Jean Cocteau, Louis Aragon, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Proust – on his deathbed – James Joyce, Elsa Schiaparelli and Catherine Deneuve.

The collection was amassed by Marion Meyer, the president of the International May Ray Association, who met the artist in Paris in the 1960s and became part of his inner circle. Man Ray had returned from Hollywood in 1951 with his wife, Juliet, and had settled in an old sculptor’s studio in the Latin Quarter.

Meyer was married to Marcel Zerbib, the artist’s editor, close friend and chess partner. “His [Man Ray’s] photographs were highly sought-after, but not his paintings, objects or drawings, and those were the works I really loved and wanted to preserve,” she said.

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Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, Man Ray established his career in US modernism in the 1910s before moving from New York to Paris a decade later and then splitting his time between the two cities. He died in Paris in November 1976 after a long career that spanned photography, painting, sculpture, drawing and other mediums.

The original Le Violon d’Ingres photograph was published in June 1924 on the front cover of the surrealist magazine Littérature, which was edited by André Breton. Man Ray was fascinated by the painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and the photograph was a reference to Ingres’s languorous nudes and his hobby of playing the violin when not painting. Le violon d’Ingres is a French idiom meaning “hobby”.

After Man Ray’s death, Juliet was inundated with requests for certification of his work. Meyer, whom the artist had asked to look after his wife, set up the international association to document his art. “It has been an enormous project, but it is done now,” she said. “There is very little out there that we don’t know about.”

“For almost 60 years I’ve devoted my life to Man Ray, and I don’t feel he needs me any more. It’s done, I’ve fulfilled my goal,” Meyer added.

Renowned photographer leaves Ford foundation board after Cheney passed over for award | The Hill

Throughout the school year, I have been the only sports photographer for The Times-Delphic. Nearly every issue of the TD this year has featured a photo captured by me.  

As we near the final stretch of the school year and the conclusion of the spring sports season, it has become increasingly apparent to me that I will always be treated differently at sporting events because I am a woman. 

At the beginning of the school year, I contacted my photo editor. My very first assignment? Covering Drake men’s soccer. Arriving at the event, I was nervous. To my surprise, a fellow photographer approached me; she took me under her wing to show me the ropes. She was excited to help me as a new photographer, and it felt like a great start. I assumed this level of friendliness would be the norm at every event. 

However, as the year rolled on and I covered more games, I quickly realized that wasn’t the case. Not everyone I encountered was as welcoming or supportive.  

There was specifically one male photographer employed by Drake Athletics who consistently ignored my presence at events. It wasn’t a matter of being focused on his work; rather, it was a deliberate disregard, evident in his greeting of all other male press members except me. This served as a stark reminder of the challenges I face as a woman in sports photography.

Players would often run into me, seemingly disregarding my presence, while my male counterparts were given the utmost respect. In one particularly stressful game in September, the situation escalated to the point where a football helmet was thrown in my direction. I had to lunge out of the way not to be hit.

After these experiences, I remember calling my mom almost in tears and saying that I thought sports photography wasn’t for me. She told me to stick with it and that it would get better. 

This semester, I had the amazing opportunity to travel to Omaha, Nebraska, for the NCAA men’s March Madness tournament. I had a press pass and was able to be on the floor for the game. As I headed into the CHI Health Center press area, I realized that the room was mostly full of men. 

I noticed another female reporter I had previously seen at past Drake events. Going up to introduce myself, she looked at me with the face of “Don’t you mess this up for me” as well as, “I’ve worked harder than you to get here.” It was as if she were silently warning me not to jeopardize her position while also asserting her superiority. 

Very curtly, she introduced herself and then turned back to talk to the other press, leaving a lingering sense of tension in the air. This encounter highlighted to me the unfortunate reality where female journalists are pitted against each other.

On the other hand, I met this wonderful woman who covers basketball in Pittsburgh. As a recent college graduate, she knew what I was going through and offered me her support. She reminded me that while women in sports journalism may be rare, we are typically a resilient and supportive community.

To my male photographer counterparts, I extend an invitation to support female photographers, even if it is just engaging in conversation with someone other than one of your “bros.” Together, we can create a supportive and empowering environment for all photographers, regardless of gender. 

In 1997, Jamie Livingston, an artist and film-maker, died on his birthday at the age of 41 in the hospital in New York where he was born. By then, Livingston had taken and saved more than 6,700 Polaroid photos, one every day for 19 years.

His project Photo of the Day (or POD)—self-portraits, candids, landscapes, celebrity snapshots, circus pictures, nudes and even memento mori shots of Livingston’s final hospital days—eventually became a no-budget exhibition in 2007 that snaked through the halls of a building at Bard College, where Livingston began the project.

Surging on the internet after that, POD resurfaced as an overnight sensation in China, recalls Hugh Crawford, a photographer and college mate who mounted the Bard show. “There was this whole thing in China about the auspiciousness of what happened on the day you were born, so everybody in China wanted to see that,” he says.

The enigmatic story of Livingston and his pictures is now the subject of a musical performance for the stage, Number Our Days: A Photographic Oratorio, with orchestra, soloists and choruses, which premieres this week at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York (12-14 April). Images from POD, gigantic blow-ups of the Polaroids, will be onstage behind the choruses.

The libretto, “elicited and distilled” by David Van Taylor, who is also credited with the oratorio’s concept, is drawn from interviews with people whom Livingston photographed. Its title comes from a passage in Psalm 90 of the Book of Psalms in the Bible, an exhortation to live a good life every day: “Teach us to number our days, so that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

The oratorio’s composer, Luna Pearl Woolf, says taking the pictures was “something of a spiritual practice, which turned out to be important to people around him, and to people all over the world. We’re not exactly making art about an artist. We’re making art about a phenomenon.”

Livingston’s pictures, like the oratorio’s choruses, can evoke camaraderie and community. They can also feel like ephemera caught in a time capsule. While the pictures capture the spirit and memory of a single second—and no more than one second—the same Polaroids, sometimes frayed and faded, can seem like meditations on our inherent impermanence.

Livingston’s pictures, taken on a Polaroid SX-70 up to the day of his death—ten years before the iPhone launched—mark a moment in image-making somewhere between Andy Warhol’s signature Polaroid snapshot and the near-infinite profusion of photos on Instagram.

Linda Shaffer, Livingstone’s widow, eager to donate the images to an institution, rejects any connection between the POD pictures and Instagram. For one thing, Livingstone had an actual camera. “I’ve read that he was the godfather of Instagram,” she says. “He really was the opposite, because it was so rule-based. It was a ritual.”

Why Livingston began the project is unclear, A few years into POD, presenting a short film about the project, Livingston said his expanding Polaroid trove, taken one per day, “continues until my death or the death of the medium, whichever comes first”.

“Jamie was an artist who believed in practice, not in theory,” says Van Taylor. “The meaning of Photo of the Day, even to him, changed over time. Whatever his intention was as he got into it, I don’t think he could have conceived what it would mean if he continued doing it, and I don’t think he did.”

Others can make up their own minds, aided by the self-published volume Some Photos of That Day; 6754 Polaroids Dated in Sequence. The 11-pound POD visual “bible” was planned to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Livingston’s death. With logistical delays, it became available in 2018. It is the closest thing to a POD catalogue raisonné, including annotated reverse sides of many pictures.

“The whole point was its completeness,” says Hugh Crawford, who edited and published the book, and created a website for Livginston’s project. “I sold about a quarter of them so far,” adds Crawford, who had 2,000 copies printed in China. “I have 12 tons of books sitting at home.”

• Number Our Days: A Photographic Oratorio, 12-14 April, Perelman Performing Arts Center, New York