‘Whitley Bay, June 1989’ from the series Writing in the Sand by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen MBE HonFRPS
In the 1980s Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen was often seen on the beaches of North-East England wearing a bikini and a camera.
“I spent a lot of time there with my daughter when she was born, but I had the camera just hanging around my neck so people could see what I was doing,” recalls the RPS Honorary Fellow who received an MBE in 2025.
What she was doing was capturing people at play. Her project Writing in the Sand was a vision of the Geordie nation escaping their everyday concerns. Konttinen, originally from Finland, settled in the north-east in the late 1960s and has spent the best part of the 60 years since photographing the place and the people, their challenges and their everyday joys.
A case in point is this image from 1989, featured in the book Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen: Byker. “This to me epitomises the freedom we have on the beaches in the UK,” Konttinen suggests. “They are communal spaces. And I realise now that communality is something that has been a huge draw for me in all my projects.”
Over the years her work has won awards – and been recognised by UNESCO – for their simple humanity, as seen here.
“The beaches offer a chance for interactions between people who wouldn’t normally come across each other in their normal lives, especially in the north-east because people don’t just go to sunbathe,” Konttinen points out.
“The two girls, who were probably students, were playing with the beach ball. Just tossing it to each other. This boy turned up, this young man, and he started kicking it like it was a football and continued to tease the girls into a game with him, a sort of flirtatious game.
“And they did. They engaged with him. They started having a laugh together. It went on for a little while, maybe 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Then he delivered the ball back to the girls and walked on.
“And I thought, ‘What a beautiful little moment.’ Quite possibly their paths would never cross again.”
But here that moment is captured forever in Konttinen’s lens, the past pinned to the page.
Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen: Byker is published by Dewi Lewis at £40. Konttinen selects her ‘Best shots’ in the October-December 2025 issue of the RPS Journal.
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