Anne Worthington moved to an estate in Manchester called Hulme and became part of the mix of artists, ex-students and squatters who had made the partly abandoned blocks of flats their own. It was in the late 1980’s; the time of the Poll Tax and the advent of rave culture, and the area was where a lot of underground art, music and politics was happening in Manchester. She was part of the performance group, Dogs of Heaven that produced a number of large-scale events around the country.
The performances were huge in scale, free to watch, and thousands of people would hear about them on the grapevine and gather at the right place and time. Somewhere between a spectacle and a ritual, the dangers inherent in some of these events meant that they couldn’t be produced now. To give a flavour, the group used wood from staircases found in empty buildings to build a forty foot high Wicker Man, loaded it on trucks to burn at Glastonbury Festival. Their final show marked the end of Hulme before the estate was pulled down and regenerated; a send-off involving live demolition, liquid fire pouring down the blocks of flats, and cars thrown off the roof.
It was around this time that she first picked up a camera and taught herself photography.
She went on to become a documentary photographer, working around the country in an old Land Rover. Over the next twenty years, she produced a body of work highlighting the conditions of housing and the effects of social and economic change that began during the 1980s.
She has documented many aspects of our lives: long-form projects about construction workers, our education system, ex-mining communities in Cumbria, the impact of de-industrialisation in different parts of the country, the effects of changes in housing policy, campaigning photography that shows the experiences of living with disability, and the effects of regeneration.
Some of this work puts her in touch with people at the edges, who are often the canaries in the coal mine of society. It’s the storytelling power of photography that interests her. Most of all, she wants the people she meets to tell you about themselves and we get to see how the larger forces in society play out over the course of someone’s life. The people she works with have touched and altered her.
Documentary work leaves photographers with ghosts, witnessing circumstances that can be hard to deal with but need acknowledging. Photographers see stories much like writers do, but a photographer must reduce what they see down to a few frames. A photograph might not provide enough space to do this justice, whereas writing can. She wrote a novel called The Unheard that came out in 2023 and won the Michael Schmidt Prize. The book takes readers deep into the world that her characters see. She has written essays and short fiction and is working on another novel.
Her photographs feature in the British Culture Archive and appear in one of the BCA’s touring exhibitions alongside photographs by Tish Murtha. She is a member of f8 Documentary group and has an upcoming book out with Café Royal in 2025 and a book due out with Fistful of Books in 2026/7.
British Culture Archive: Documenting Life in East Manchester 2000s | Anne Worthington
The Unheard: The Unheard by Anne Worthington | confingo
TALK PHOTO is a fortnightly evening social event in Oriel Colwyn’s gallery space, where invited speakers are here IN PERSON to share presentations and insights about their work or projects, with a friendly intimate audience.
The talks start at 7pm (doors open 6.30pm) with audience tickets issued on a first come, first served basis.
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Due to space limitations, we will be capping the audience to 30 people and are happy to offer a FREE option to remove any financial barriers to attend.