In For The Long Haul

Ailsa McWhinnie finds out what drives three exponents of the long-form documentary genre to revisit their subjects time and time again

- Ailsa McWhinnie

Life after the coal industry

Mik Critchlow has been photographing his home town of Ashington, and the demise of the coal industry, since 1977

IN 1977, Mik Critchlow was 22 years old and had spent the previous seven years in the Merchant Navy. Whenever he returned to his hometown of Ashington in Northumberland on leave, he would notice the rapid changes that were taking place in the area. Almost entirely reliant on the coal industry, Ashington was once the hub for 114 collieries. By the time Mik first picked up a camera in the late ’70s, only 14 remained. ‘I started to realise it was important to record what I saw and the people I knew,’ he says. More than 40 years and some 50,000 negatives later, his work is about to be recognised with the publication of a book, Coal Town, by Bluecoat Press.

It is the urge to get beneath the surface and explore a subject from the inside out that characterises the documentary photographer. The long-form documentary photographer will stick with that same subject for year upon year,

recording not only the changes but also the things that stay the same. ‘I see it as a duty,’ Mik explains. ‘A duty to show things as they are. It’s not about nostalgia – it’s the real now.’

His main focus is on the lack of employment in Ashington. At its peak, 5,000 miners lived in the town. As Mik puts it, ‘That’s 5,000 families. And there were ancillary industries feeding the mining industry that closed at the same time as the mines. We were very, very hard hit. Now, there are problems with alcohol and drugs, and second- or third-generation unemployed kids who have never worked and who have no future prospects. Nowadays, the main employer is the 24-hour Asda store, but I’m told most who work there are on zero-hour contracts.’

People’s history