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Lee Miller, the great American photographer of the second world war, has a high-profile biopic awaiting release, Lee, with Kate Winslet in the lead. But another talented woman with an eloquent camera, the late Tish Murtha, is the centre of a fine new documentary, Tish. For now, British photographer Murtha is still less famous than Miller, but the reputation of her bold and vivid work has rightly soared in recent years. And the big screen proves a wonderful frame for her images, some taken in the fleshpots of 1980s Soho, but most in her home patch of Elswick, in the hardscrabble West End of Newcastle.

There, through the 1970s, she built a grand chronicle of place and people, often focused on children only a little younger than herself, making a playground of the stark, deindustrialised urban landscape. (In one of her best known photographs, kids jump on to mattresses from a high window in a derelict house, watched by a ventriloquist’s dummy.) For all the ruination, a friend remarks here, these are not pictures of poverty — they are portraits of childhood, comic and joyful.

And yet, of course, they are also studies of poverty, a subject Murtha knew from the inside. She photographed it as per her general approach to life: frankly, with a stubborn resistance to clichés about working-class communities. The children in Murtha’s pictures pored over encyclopaedias left in abandoned houses; opera rang through her own family home. 

But director Paul Sng doesn’t romanticise. Murth’sa tyrannical father also made that home violent. Honesty is Sng’s watchword too, as well as graceful understatement. The film is handsome, but Sng keeps nudging the spotlight away from his own creative decisions: back towards the photographs, and the presence on-camera of Murtha’s daughter, Ella, a sensitive interviewer of friends and colleagues.

The documentary contains recreations of moments from Tish Murtha’s life

The biographical grain is rich and deep. Yet Tish also makes room for the wider context. How could he not, you can hear his subject demand. If all our lives unfold on the faultlines of the personal and the political, they did so dramatically for a young woman taking pictures of working-class life during Thatcherism. The film salutes Murtha’s role as a recorder of social history in the making.

It also teases out the cultural adjuncts to issues of money and class: when and how photography is deemed fit for galleries, the judgment of British arts funding bodies who failed to see how good she was. But however raw the story can be — and sometimes tragic too — Tish is a celebration, not just of talent but how it was applied. 

That Murtha had a marvellous eye is clear as soon as you see one of her pictures. But the moments she captured often only happened after months spent gaining her subject’s trust. Friends recall with a smile that Murtha was not a woman whose time you wasted. She could even be “scary”, one says with wry fondness. Maybe the highest praise you could give this beautiful film is this: you suspect she would have liked it.

★★★★★

In UK cinemas from November 17