Warmth and bitterness mix in photographs of coal's great struggle

Back in the summer of 1984, at the height of the miners' strike, photographer Keith Pattison was sent by the North Eastern Artists' Agency (since rebranded as Helix Arts ) to spend a month documenting the strike from Easington Colliery . He stayed there on and off until the strike finally ended the following March. No Redemption is both an exhibition of his work during the strike, and a book produced after he and Red Riding, Damned United writer David Peace went back to Easington 25 years after the strike, on Election Day in 2010, to interview three of the people captured in Keith's original photographs. At the time of the strike the colliery employed 2730 people. By the time the pit finally closed down in 1993, putting the final 1900 workers on the dole, nearly 40% of the population of the village was on invalidity benefit – the highest of any community in the country. The population has continued to decline, falling to under 5000 in the 2001 census, and probably less than that by the 2011 one. For the book, David Peace spoke to Alan Cummings, the Easington Miners' Lodge Secretary, Jimmy Johnson, a miner who stayed on strike for the full year, and his wife Marilyn, who helped run the kitchen for the 'Save Easington Area Mines' campaign, producing up to 500 meals a day for the strikers. Bitterness is still apparent after more than quarter of a century - as Marilyn Johnson shows against Margaret Thatcher: "May she rot in hell. I hate that person. She had no heart at all". However the comradeship and solidarity also shows through, with Marilyn remembering a good day in the kitchen: "One day the doors flew open and all these young lads and lasses came in carrying trays and it was Durham University and they'd had the big ball in the night time and all the food that was remaining they brought for us. Go on, tuck in! Have a party! It was just little things like that. Big things to us. Because they thought of us." Some bewilderment is also apparent – Jimmy Johnson talking about the lack of a ballot said of the beginning of the strike: "Great. We'll have a ballot now. And get it easy. We've got 50%. But we never had a ballot. I can't understand why." Some of the streets – steeply raking down the hill towards the North Sea - are recognisable from the film "Billy Elliot", which is set there. Although Pearce says: "Much as I admire Bill Elliot and anything that makes people aware of the strike, at the end of the day I'm not satisfied with nostalgia. I didn't want the book to offer a sense of redemption because as a country we haven't got it." One of the rare domestic pictures shows a striker's home, the tattooed miner with his feet up by the fire, his pre-teenage son reading a pamphlet called How your benefit is worked out , his wife watching Arthur Scargill on the TV, with a reproduction of Constable's Hay Wain on one wall opposite a poster of Marx with his quote "Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it". There is a certain theatricality to Keith Pattison's photographs – the group of pickets standing by Tow Law opencast mine, men collecting sea coal on the coast, locals watching police coming up the backstreet – so it is no surprise to find that his main job is as a theatrical production photographer for the likes of Keswick's Theatre by the Lake and Live Theatre . Spending so long in the community clearly gave him extra access and deeper understanding of his subjects, so it's no surprise to see that he managed to catch many happy and heart-warming scenes as well as the inevitable ones of confrontation on the picket lines. There are some excellent pictures in this show – moving, funny, beautiful, weird - even if he seldom quite manages to capture the moment in the way the late great Don McPhee of the Guardian so often did. Keith Pattison: No Redemption: 1984 Easington Colliery Miners' Strike, University Gallery, Northumbria University , Newcastle, 2 December to 27 January "No Redemption", photography by Keith Pattison, words by David Peace, is published by Flambard Press ,price £15.