YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT Tish Murtha

Youth Unemployment is the book by Tish Murtha that collects the images and texts of the homonymous exhibition. Ella Murtha, daughter of the photographer, has been collecting for several years the archive left by her mother in which she documented the streets of Newcastle in the seventies and eighties. His snapshots reflected the precarious situation of a whole generation victim of a harsh economic reform, the a youth unemployment rate that the area suffered, a trend that occurred throughout the country and which reached catastrophic proportions during the Thatcher era.

As in Elswick Kids , the photographs document the many facets of the problem, the alignment of a generation made expendable as a result of economic forces beyond its control, and much more Beyond their understanding, the brutality of having to live on social subsistence benefits, the endless days and without any objective, the impossibility of an acceptable future and the deep feeling of frustration and helplessness.