Jimmy Forsyth

Photographer who chronicled vanishing community life in the north-east
Jimmy Forsyth
Forsyth at home in 1990 Photograph: Keith Pattison

The Tyneside amateur photographer Jimmy Forsyth, who has died aged 95, produced an acclaimed portrait of industrial working-class life in Britain. A major collection of his photographs, Jimmy Forsyth: Photographs from the 1950s and 1960s, was published only weeks before his death, one of the many more recent celebrations of his work and a mark of recognition for his innocent vision and achievement in documenting a communal way of life that has now vanished, in a body of work produced on the meagre resources of the dole.

Born in Barry, Glamorgan, Jimmy left school at 14 and worked as a fitter. War work brought him to Tyneside in 1943 when he heard that they were "shouting for fitters". However, only four days after his arrival at the ICI plant in Prudhoe-on-Tyne, a splinter flew from a lathe and damaged his right pupil, leaving him blind in one eye.

In 1946 Jimmy was sacked from ICI and moved to lodgings at 16 Suffolk Street, in Elswick, to the west of Newcastle upon Tyne, near the vast Vickers Armstrong works, a vibrant community linked by the Scotswood Road (which features in the Geordie anthem Blaydon Races). He recalled: "All the people mixed well, they were sociable and they talked to one another. I was never made to feel an outsider." Jimmy, a single man who was often lonely, came to appreciate living in the warmth of this close-knit community.

But in the early 1950s he heard rumours of plans to demolish Elswick and Scotswood Road. A whole way of life was under threat, and Jimmy imagined that he could capture the spirit of the community through photography. Thus he began in 1954, with a second-hand box camera and no formal training, his epic project to produce a portrait of the area by a trusted insider.

Mindful of posterity, he took a systematic approach – his images are indexed and his subjects carefully identified. Crucially, the task also saved Jimmy from unemployment. He assembled the prints, processed by Boots or a local chemist, in tartan-covered albums, and including the price of the films, his photography probably consumed a considerable part of his £2-a-week National Assistance money. Often he would sell people their prints for half a crown to fund the next roll of film. In an effort to improve his finances, Jimmy opened a shop in 1956 in Pine Street, but his generosity in providing goods "on tick" soon forced him to sell up.

When the bulldozers eventually came to Elswick in the late 1950s, they inspired a period of intense activity for Jimmy, who stayed until the last moment to document the painful process of demolition. He even photographed the demolition men and the families left behind, until, he said, there was a knock at 356 Scotswood Road, where he was living: "You'd better move out. We're doing this block next."

In 1962 Jimmy captured the moment when the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell and T Dan Smith, head of Newcastle city council, unveiled a bronze statue in front of the new high-rise developments that were replacing the old terraces. The photograph conveys the utopian mood of the time, but Jimmy was sceptical: "The planners actually believed that they could build communities," he said, "but instead the community was scattered to the four winds, people were sent to far-flung estates, and a community was lost forever."

As direct experience of the lost Elswick became more remote, so the interest in Jimmy's photographs grew, and a local librarian, Des Walton, toured some of the first displays of his work during the 1970s. In 1979, the Side Gallery in Newcastle, a venue for documentary photography, organised a major exhibition of his work. For the first time, quality prints and a dedicated space revealed the full resonance and power of the images. The show finally established him as a photographer of national significance.

Inspired by this recognition, Jimmy, by then nearing 70, experienced something of a personal renaissance, and he ventured out to photograph Tyneside once more, only this time in colour and with an automatic camera, and he became a familiar and much-loved figure on the streets on Newcastle. Only recently did poor health force him to abandon the street portraits and city scenes, 35,000 exposures later.

In 1986 the first of three books, The Scotswood Road, was published, following hard on the heels of a Tyne Tees television documentary No Fancy Shades, which was screened nationally. At 73 Jimmy was interviewed, taking along his tartan albums, by Jools Holland, live on Channel 4's music show The Tube.

A year later, Jimmy travelled to London to receive an international photography prize, the coveted Halina award, from the arts minister Richard Luce. A cameo in the 1988 Mike Figgis film Stormy Monday as a newspaper-seller sealed his status as a local folk hero.

In 1993 he settled at the Cedars, one of the apartment blocks in the celebrated 1962 Gaitskell photograph, but friends became increasingly concerned for Jimmy's safety in the flat, which was crammed with 40,000 images. When he was persuaded to donate his collection to Tyne and Wear archives, a Transit van was needed to take it away.

It was always clear to Jimmy, a lifelong socialist, that his work should be publicly available. "It's no good burying the pictures," he told me in a final interview. "They should be given out to more people, and they should be free. After all, they belong to their subjects, to the people themselves."

• James Forsyth, photographer, born 13 August 1913; died 11 July 2009

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