Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen: Byker Revisited

Photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen lived in Byker originally in the 1970s and documented many of the fellow residents around her and decided to go back and re-photograph the same area and the people that live there. Her first book looked at the working class community that lived in Byker and in many ways gave them a voice in their struggle with being rehoused. The revisited project looks at the new more multicultural community that now resides in Byker and she asks the residents to try and imagine themselves in one image, which she then photographs. I think that this is a really good idea for a photography project and it shows that times have greatly changed in the thirty years between the two books and the racial diversity has become a lot broader and varied, in my opinion for the better.

Original Byker project photographs from the 1970s:







Byker Revisited photographs: