“The Interest Is in What You Can Show People, What You Can Reveal”: Retrospective on the Photography of Chris Killip
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: On an ordinary midweek afternoon in February 2023, I attended a retrospective exhibition of photographer Chris Killip's work at the Photographers’ Gallery in central London. Killip was one of the most influential British photographers of the late twentieth century, and his work provides a startling portrayal of working-class life. Curated by Tracy Marshall-Grant and Ken Grant, the retrospective consisted of over 150 photographs spanning Killip's career from work in his native Isle of Man in the early 1970s to the various projects that went into his most famous work, In Flagrante (1988). The Killip retrospective was one of the gallery's most popular recent exhibitions. Going into the exhibition without a formal background in photography criticism, I discovered later that I shared with experts some observations and reactions to Killip's work. I consequently read contemporary reviewers’ assessments, which I discuss here, but this review is largely my personal impressions of Killip's work and my effort to locate him within his artistic and political contexts.Christopher David Killip was born on July 11, 1946, in Douglas, capital of the Isle of Man. He died in October 2020 at the age of seventy-four after a battle with lung cancer. Killip's parents ran a pub in Douglas and he worked as a trainee hotel manager after leaving school at sixteen. When he was almost eighteen, Killip worked as a beach photographer, earning enough money in summer 1964 to move to London. By October 1964 he had secured work in advertising photography; he soon went freelance. Killip had an epiphany on seeing his first photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1969. (There were no photo galleries in England at that time.)For Killip the realization “that photography was valid for its own sake had a profound effect on me. . . . It wasn't the thought that photography was or wasn't art; that wasn't my concern. It was that it was valued for its own sake. And that gave me the confidence to go back and not think of photography in the same way.”1 Back in the Isle of Man, Killip photographed during the day, working evenings in his father's pub. The owner whose New York gallery had first inspired Killip commissioned and paid in advance for a portfolio of his Isle of Man work in 1971. A year later Killip secured an Arts Council commission to photograph Huddersfield (a northern industrial town in West Yorkshire) and Bury St. Edmunds (a market town in Suffolk, eastern England).The event that really catalyzed Killip's career came in 1975 when the funding body Northern Arts awarded him a two-year fellowship to photograph in northeastern England, necessitating Killip's move to Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In 1977 Killip cofounded and became first director of the Side Gallery in Newcastle, located a stone's throw from the quayside area and the river Tyne.2 A year earlier, Killip embarked on a project to photograph workers collecting sea coal in Lynemouth, on the Northumberland coast, north of Newcastle.3 By the early 1980s, Lynemouth had formed a community of forty or fifty locals and travelers in a permanent camp near the beach, selling the sea coal they harvested.4 It took six years for Killip to gain the locals’ trust, but once he had done so, he lived sporadically in a caravan near the beach, becoming, between 1983 and 1984, immersed in this marginalized community's life.5 In 1984, the Side Gallery displayed seventy images from “Seacoal.”6In the same period Killip also photographed the remote fishing community of Skinningrove in the southernmost reaches of the region, some eighty miles from Lynemouth, and beyond another postindustrial city, Middlesbrough. When the miners’ strike broke out in March 1984, Killip suspended all his other projects and began recording the conflict in the Northeast, taking some five thousand images. On the miners’ return to work a year later, Killip donated his photographs to a local branch of the union. Only a handful were ever exhibited or published.7In April 1985, Killip first visited the Station, an anarcho-punk venue just across the river Tyne, in Gateshead. “Amazed by the energy and feel of the place,” he began to attend as many Saturdays as he could.8 Selections from all of Killip's northeastern photography was displayed in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and published as In Flagrante in 1988. (Killip published his first book, Isle of Man, in 1980.) In 1989, Pirelli UK commissioned Killip to photograph its tire factory in the Midlands. Two years later, he moved to the United States. He worked at Harvard University until 2017, when he retired as professor of visual and environmental studies. He remained living in the United States until his death in 2020.Killip's black-and-white images depict a certain beauty in the faces of both his Isle of Man and northern England subjects.9 Many capture an element of their subject's personality or character. The images portray a panorama of dignity, courage, fortitude, and, at times, defiance. They reflect working-class struggle, toil, and misery. Many convey a sense of defeat, destruction, and decay. The faces show little joy. Precious few smile or laugh. Humor, that essential human mechanism for coping with extreme adversity, seems almost entirely absent.10 A girl skipping on the waste ground screws her face into a serious look of concentration rather than the simple enjoyment of uncomplicated childhood one might expect (see fig. 1). The dentured smile of a man in the west end of Newcastle betrays a grimace as he balances a child on his shoulders. The child has a similarly pained expression. Strikingly, Killip captures a few scenes of people on the beach who seem as though they are enjoying themselves; a few people actually smile. Those who do are a group of North Shields old women celebrating the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977 and some of the people at a celebration of the wedding of Charles and Diana in 1981.Hope is elusive in Killip's work. Even the images hinting at resistance are rendered futile. For example, consider two images that bookend In Flagrante, a series of photographs Killip made in northern England from 1973 to 1985. An image near the beginning of the series depicts a red-brick-terraced street scene in the north Tyneside shipbuilding town of Wallsend, maybe of a set of Tyneside flats, a regionally specific style of working-class housing built of red brick. Two indistinct figures walk the snow-covered street. Someone has written on a wall the defiant slogan “Don't vote; prepare for revolution. CPB (M-L) [Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist)].” In an image near the end of In Flagrante, the communist slogan remains, but the people and a large slice of the housing have gone, replaced by piles of rubble. It is a powerful image of defeat, hopelessness, and marginalization.To my mind the only hope Killip offers lies in the punks, who are frequently (and irritatingly) referred to as “skinheads” in commentators’ reviews from the 1980s. (Some did have fully shaven “skinheads,” but they were anarcho-punks; conflating them specifically glosses over the significance of the politics of anarcho-punk.) Killip's depictions of this self-organized, anarchist-run youth culture convey their energy and anger brilliantly; that “the hippies now wear black” means we probably do not miss much color even with Killip's insistence on using black-and-white film.11 Killip captured these images at the Station, which he remembered as “an anarcho-punk venue set up in an old police social club in Gateshead” that lay just on the other side of the High Level Bridge over the mighty river Tyne.12Anarchist youth aside, I find the overt politics of the period underrepresented in the Killip retrospective at the Photographers’ Gallery—and bizarrely so, given that he extensively photographed key periods of late twentieth-century working-class protest, such as the 1984–85 miners’ strike. Of course, the region was much more than its fast-shrinking pool of coal miners, generally regarded as rather conservative in the immediate post-1945 period but catalyzed into militancy in the 1980s by aggressive government policy and local left-wing leadership that threatened the miners’ livelihoods and quality of life. But to exclude them almost entirely seems peculiar.Interestingly, the only exception to royalty-induced mirth I noticed in the exhibition is one single photo from the 1984 Durham miner's gala, an annual event that in normal times occasioned considerable alcohol-fueled merriment among the northeastern working classes.13 This photo is one of only two that Killip shot from the gala and one of only four photographs in the exhibition directly related to the region's coal miners. Their bitter, protracted dispute with the Thatcher government was only a few months old when Killip photographed the annual gala.14 One other exception is the powerful image of the 1984 police occupation of the mining village of Easington, later the location for the hit film Billy Elliott (2000).15 Elsewhere in Killip's work the overt politics is complex; at the time of the IRA hunger strikers’ action in the Maze Prison in 1981, the graffiti on a North Shields (on north Tyneside) housing estate wall reads, “Bobby Sands greedy Irish pig,” with “Smash IRA” daubed near it (see fig. 2).The ways people's place and their work affect them physically as well as emotionally fascinated Killip. Fired by his “conviction that no life is ordinary: everyday lives are sublime”—and clearly echoing a “history from below” to much by the He out all the of social as a of in a in Killip have no really in The is in show photography was rendered Killip he find another the same He worked in using color much from the of the Killip's were displayed as large as four by five gave a into his in the early When I go a now . . . and I look and the I to . . . to the on When it as a which means it from an an photo of a photograph only when it when look the when it when not but moved to it are the that me the only the that when that I find and was in his to various He of his first to Lynemouth to photograph the sea in first the did was and me with their and not a when the is a and until February 1983 did he a from one of their that a had up the of sea coal from the Killip went to photograph the sea and soon moved into their The protracted and that to Killip the Lynemouth sea lives to his and (see and In Flagrante exhibition a photograph of one of the sea coal to Killip's had his into their photo that one in Killip's working had an entirely for the in a the of his made him of the of working at Killip a of fishing it to one with a this did not him from taking some human photographs of the community Only four images from this series went into In Flagrante Killip in them and of his that he time and to their The images just published in were first as a in Killip and into in the his work at the anarcho-punk venue the Station, Killip It was for and by the people who went that I I photographed ever me I was from or even who I A with a with the to my a my and a and its my I have out of a work much to that of who photographed in the in the 1970s and whose Killip his body of work to that in The In Flagrante exhibition also some of the as it was “the photographer of who first made Killip of photography as a means of The of the most famous British photographer of the twentieth century, died in also It was work that Killip first in New York in the late One of Killip's images was of Going to was a town on Tyneside when the local were in the The local the famous March to in government But it was only for that a in local In Flagrante, industrial has more than its of black-and-white photographers to by on the and Chris Killip is not one of Killip's to that him of all of and him from most British He Killip's work to that of photographer The of and as well as the But the of time and place in Killip's work set him from social A more that Killip's work was to from in their the is not to to later 1970s and 1980s of northeastern working-class life were and even though black-and-white was out of in this of British and began color to the and of Killip's that his work a with and its was in that the who the of In Flagrante little of a from the lives of their Killip's work a on a on the working and the and of Britain in Killip's work images of and in For Killip's was in its that with by Killip has a into a with and but not Killip's the of his Killip's exhibition of of on human It was powerful as from another a rather but not For the was even in Killip's “skinheads” when the they have to face the they are Many regarded In Flagrante as a for the Britain of by the industrial And was some in the is to find and, the effect of these is a the as almost are photographs of the of only in a only by the of an of social Killip living in the of an industrial for The was to a sense of defeat, given the of the Thatcher after the of by an and with the of over the in the For Killip's by Killip's living in the of which for an from was a to a as as the this an was Killip's of northeastern working-class life the had no ordinary life of and as it has had a of On the other Killip's own to In Flagrante his of England to much in and I and I that in these photographs as they face the of in a which their lives as The images Killip's own and in his my time in or were they of Britain in the 1980s, their Killip in a for the sense of and by on the back from he no . . . are no no Killip's as by the of they have their own . . . This is most these their human lives in by their Killip's work photographers who at more than their to and in these photographs is not in but has Killip's for the to certain images as this other images were this up a one for Killip to the of England two North and but an exhibition this . . . and and the had a For Killip's work was as it was to the of his that that images of and the done to people work the that such a the human But he also to hinting at later became as and on to the most that of and also of the gallery of for by this was the of on working-class and on the sense of was not took this on the anger these photographs up and the the has to do to find some for who have to But to (and in In Flagrante that Killip is that a for the photographed is that of the British political and even the is to the of the and old written no hope of are we at these he they not as until the time for A more recent a between is the of photographer with the in the work of Killip and photographer some not entirely of in Killip's Side Gallery (and is In the the first film in a area to a government in It from Britain and of were by the and it has has the area on the eastern side of the contemporary to Killip's 1980s anarcho-punk the (see fig. recent years have the of the whose to northeastern working-class life a sense of Killip's Killip's work contemporary British The is we return to the the of the Killip did the shipbuilding and the coal miners’ struggle, much of his most famous work to on the in of on the coast, but also in of the and of the region as an industrial For example, Killip that when he first the sea at work in he the and it but The beach me was of with and into the were in the sea to the using to to out the coal from the The place the and the twentieth The that Killip much to Lynemouth was that was the lives lived to to workers whose livelihoods were threatened by the first industrial Killip was sea from the of the northeastern to was which the Killip sea at sea are a with some working one beach in the region in at much of Killip's published work seems more with the industrial did not by his of and means many of his images look they have in the the of In Flagrante Two Killip was recording working-class life and both and in the 1970s and 1980s. in local government across the Killip's The that Killip in the 1970s was the of the of the to Newcastle the of the It into a in the Killip's images also to the early and to the for that the of working-class housing in the west end of were late the Tyneside workers (and some coal had A New Newcastle them from working-class people who lived in and valued their at the out of largely of their own rather than the resistance the this west Newcastle, not by local the in the single most popular of the Thatcher from 1984, even a of the In the west end of Newcastle, only a of that housing has by and considerable the and of the area that the Side out a Killip photographs in the same he visited in the 1970s and 1980s. some of the might look the 1980s by his for example, seem to have made a recent This to in the really began after the it has a and In that it is not that the that in (and the industrial North that in The to in is in Killip's work. It another years is a sense in which working-class has The of the 1980s as the Thatcher the of in an effort to and to over in early 1984 and remained in many northern the The 1980s of the March and its more but consequently famous of the one of Killip's was the of Killip the sea in their with the local which their camp and not the sea coal to this Killip the sea the during his time at the Station, Killip was that was just after the miners’ strike and was a of youth of the at have a and this as a was to them and their But is not the same Even in the of the and are more than workers was a sense in the 1980s that work, of almost people and was to the to the of work, and many workers and work of Even they to up their In many they also on which have Killip not have but have to more are to more and are in than their 1980s workers are also to on of workers in and have of the of in Britain the The has now for with a in during the as a these of course, do not and on the of the miners’ that Killip photographed in 1984–85 (see fig. But they and in a many workers did not return to the after a of But even now workers to the most of their to and the British has Killip was working as the of industrial in began in in the and took it and the New in between times did to the and of contemporary British politics has its in a working-class New The to to its working-class in the taking these for British political and that New and a of the For these a of in postindustrial northern a to and The the It is not that many of the marginalized a social and for the simple slogan to back the during leadership in the on a social by The came within a of and But in to to the of the of the by its its to the a in the of of northern that had in for to the in the It as though had to between northern working-class and had a of working-class to do had to for the first paid the of to the of two that the of on have serious for the are some in the 1980s with Killip's work. the that two were in that the a of no significance an by Party a few years The was by some in the 1980s to to a and this sense of the was and by a working-class at Durham University who the that many from to at the of their has and remains, more in the North of England than the the is as a of social For and Killip's photographs that has with is not as an but the working as a central political that the working in British politics and that the of as or by no effort to the at has and only the of the and is politics The of and political in the and catalyzed by It is to that the working of the is now Killip (and thought it was in the with no sense of a with no or set of to the of all whose lives have written the the and for example, in the out during to and have no no money from the the now in culture and up over to the as coal is also a much the they do not as they a for was the in early did in the The seems to the of the New even in the came as with the became almost from the he the on element from little sense of a government even to the serious and social without the seems a more of is that the now or the of its working-class these observations might for a politics or as Killip and his were in the 1980s. The lies in the punks, and in that that inspired Killip in in 1985. On the one it in the of their and in the of the annual event that is the Durham miners’ gala, two thousand July with and the in an of political and It is also in the ways that place and coal mining to a sense of who they them to a in their in their and in And it is also in of that up all over in all of to to in when rather than the Killip's given they ways to and to out a living on the and in such all they were many of its key . . . . . . London, the Killip retrospective to at one of its now as it was April and by the Arts on the side of the within of both the of the and, on the north side of the Tyne, the Side it and not working-class life it and it might it has a in up these and in recording the lives it
Author: Lewis Mates
Language: English
Topic: Photographic and Visual Arts
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4399201684