RIP - Chris Killip

 

Photograph by Kent Rodzwicz

A British photographer died last week at the age of 74. He was Chris Killip and had been suffering from cancer. I was sad to hear this as he was a formative influence for me, even though my style is nothing like his. His gritty black and white pictures of working class life in the North-East of England and of the community in Skinningrove on the high North Yorkshire coast taught me a lot about how life was at the time and what to look for in a picture. Of course he photographed more than that, including portraiture as well as in Ireland, but these were the pictures which stuck with me.

Born in the Isle of Man in 1946 he worked as an assistant to commercial photographers in London during the 1960's and early 70's, having some early success and attracting funding for his work through the Arts Council in the form of a commission to photograph the market towns of Huddersfield and Bury St Edmunds in England for the exhibition “Two Views—Two Cities” at Huddersfield City Art Gallery and Bury St. Edmunds Art Gallery. In 1975, he was awarded a two-year fellowship through which he would photograph England’s northeast. Killip also directed Side Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne where he lived from 1977 to 1979. He said of the people in his pictures "They are at the tough end of things, the people in my photographs. It’s about the struggle for work, being out of work, fighting for work." He had never taken a photograph before he became a photographer at 17, inspired by a Cartier-Bresson photo he saw in Paris Match magazine.

These were the days before digital photography and most of his work was taken on a large format 5x4 camera - a big piece of kit to carry round that made him very visible. Probably his best known work was a series of photographs taken between 1973 and 1985 and published under the title In Flagrante and showing the impact of the deindustrialisation on people as it happened. Killip himself said of the book "History is what's written, my photographs are what happened". Martin Parr, a contemporary and friend of Killip, has said that he was "without a doubt one of the key players in postwar British photography.”

Despite Creative Camera Magazine recognising the importance of his work and giving his work an entire issue in 1977 Killip failed to gain the recognisition he deserved on Britain and moved to the United States where he was the Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University for 26 years. His major retrospective took place in the Folkwang Museum in Essen in 2012. 2018 however saw the publication of four books of earlier photographs in the UK. Some recognition at last. These are now difficult to obtain and expensive if you do find them...

It was his pictures of Skinningrove and Seacoal Beach which first drew my attention to his work as I had visited Skinningrove during the early 60's during a holiday in Staithes and later returned when I moved to the Humberside area in the early 1990's. There was not much there apart from terraces of houses and a beach. Seacoal was further north which, in the 60's still had coal on it that people collected and sold. It seemed to me that he had caught the whole spirit of these places which were desperate, forgotten and yet spirited and defiant and with a massive sense of community.

RIP Chris Killick and thanks for the unwritten history.