No Redemption | Keith Pattison

The Miners’ Strike of 1984-85 shook the foundations of British society, tearing apart traditional mining communities and leaving them in tatters. No Redemption looks back at one particular broken community, Easington Colliery.

In August 1984, Keith Pattison was commissioned by Sunderland's Artists' Agency to photograph the strike in Easington Colliery for a month. He remained there on and off until it ended in March 1985, photographing from behind the lines a community rallying together against implacable opposition. Making, as the documentary filmmaker John Grierson said 'creative use of actuality', Pattison frames a narrative sequence of images from the optimism of August, through the deepening pessimism of winter, to the final vote to return to work.

Twenty-five years later Pattison took David Peace to Easington to interview three of the people caught up in the strike - Alan Cummings, Marilyn Johnson, and her husband Jimmy. Their memories, still freshly felt, make explicit the anger, pain, resilience and warmth captured in the photographs.

Keith Pattison was born and worked in the North East of England. The Side Gallery in Newcastle exhibited a number of these images part-way through the strike in September 1984 with an accompanying publication written by Huw Beynon. An exhibition toured to London, Newcastle, Easington and The National Coal Mining Museum in 2012 and images were included in Making History: Art and Documentary in Britain from 1929 to Now at TATE Liverpool. they also appeared on stage in Malmo Opera’s production of Billy Elliot. 

David Peace - named in 2003 as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists - was born and brought up in Yorkshire. He is the author of eleven novels, including the Red Riding Quartet, adapted for television by ChannelFour in 2009, GB84, which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize,The Damned Utd, Red or Dead,which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2013, and most recently Tokyo Redux. His latest book is Munichs. He lives in Tokyo.