In the television series of the book Another Way of Telling, the artist and writer John Berger begins the second episode of the series by discussing a photograph of a young skinhead sitting on a brick wall and crying. Berger observes that it is no coincidence that the young man is framed by the bricks in the photograph; indeed, he states that there is a commonality between what is happening to the youth and the bricks surrounding him. Berger’s comments point not only to the metaphorical role of the objects in the photograph, but also to the role of the photograph in telling the story of the individual and the place in which he finds himself. The photograph Boy Sitting on Wall, Jarrow 1976, is from Chris Killip’s series In Flagrante, one of the most significant bodies of photographic work on the North East of England, an area of Britain that has been regularly photographed since the 1920s with the rise in popularity of the photo essay through magazines such as Picture Post.
Born in Douglas on the Isle of Man in 1946, Killip, who is largely self-taught in photography, began his career as an assistant to commercial photographer Adrian Flowers in Chelsea, London, between 1963 and 1965. After several years as a freelance photographer’s assistant in London, Killip returned briefly to his native Isle of Man between 1969 and 1971, before returning to mainland Britain in 1972, this time to the north of England, whose landscape and people became the subject of his most celebrated work.
It was during the intervening years on the Isle of Man that Killip’s work took a direction that would have a significant impact on his subsequent work in the North of England in the 1970s and 1980s. Having been exposed to the work of photographers such as Paul Strand, Walker Evans and August Sander at the Museum of Modern Art while working in New York in 1969, Killip gave up commercial photography to return home and photograph the island as he experienced it. The result was not a body of work that expressed his personal history of living on the island, but rather a narrative that told the story of the changing social relationships between the islanders and their environment, as he experienced it during the social upheavals brought about by the changing demographics of the population and the influx of wealthy financial service workers to the island. Although his photographs of the island and its people appeared in a series of photo essays between 1969 and 1973, the complete body of work was not published as the book Isle of Man until 1980.
In the years between photographing and publishing his work on the Isle of Man, Killip began to photograph in the north-east of England. In 1972 he received a commission from the Arts Council of Great Britain for the touring exhibition Two Views – Two Cities, and in the same year he exhibited at the Photographers’ Gallery in London in the group show Four Photographers.
Kill’s work on the North East in these early years was also supported by a number of major awards in the early and mid-1970s. He received an Arts Council of Great Britain Photography Award for 1973-1974 and was the recipient of the Northern Arts Photography Fellowship in 1975-1976. In 1977 Killip also received an Arts Council of Great Britain Major Bursary Award.
It would be wrong to portray Killip during this period as a journeyman photographer travelling around and photographing the North East of England. Killip was also very much at the forefront of a fledgling photographic culture during this period, making a significant contribution to bringing photography to a wider public. Between 1976 and 1980 he was a member of the Photography Committee of Northern Arts in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, which awarded prizes to other young photographers. During this period, 1977-1979, he was also a member of the Photography Committee of the Arts Council of Great Britain.
Killip’s role in supporting photography was not limited to an administrative role on Arts Council committees. In 1976 he was a founder member of the influential Side Gallery in Newcastle- Upon-Tyne. Between 1976 and 1984, Killip played an active role as an exhibition curator and consultant, before serving as director of the Side Gallery from 1977 to 1979.
During his eight-year association with the Side Gallery, Killip curated and co-curated a number of exhibitions which brought past and contemporary documentary photography to the attention of the North East art community. Past exhibitions have included work by Lewis Hine, August Sander, Weegee and nineteenth-century figures Thomas Annan and E.J. Belloq. Exhibitions of contemporary documentary photographers included the work of familiar names such as Martine Frank, Robert Doisneau, Don McCullin and Gilles Peress, as well as young British photographers Chris Steel-Perkins and Trish Murtha.
After a two-year stint as photographic consultant to the London Review of Books between 1979 and 1981, Killip spent the next decade concentrating on his photographic work, exhibiting throughout Europe, North America and the southern hemisphere. The many years spent photographing the North of England culminated in the publication of In Flagrante in 1988, recognised as one of the most important and influential bodies of British documentary photography of the twentieth century. If his photographic influences were predominantly North American, the direction and subject matter of this work was very much shaped by the political and ideological impact on society at the time. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative laissez-faire economic policies led to rapid deindustrialisation throughout the North of England, the results of which were etched into the landscape and the faces of those who remained.
Killip’s work is not the campaigning social documentary that is the norm for such subject matter: indeed, in the brief introductory text, he was to admit that the images said more about his experiences than those photographed. As Berger was to comment on the standard photographs of such subjects: “In Flagrante does not belong to that tradition. Chris Killip is admittedly aware that a better future for the photographed is unlikely. The wreckage visible in his photographs, the debris that surrounds the protagonists, is already part of a future that has been chosen – and chosen democratically, according to the laws of our particular political system”.
After receiving the Henri Cartier-Bresson Prize in 1989, Killip was awarded an honorary Master of Arts by Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1994.
In 1991 Killip was invited to be a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University. He was appointed tenured professor in 1994 and served as chair of the department from 1994-98. He retired from Harvard in December 2017 and continued to live in Cambridge, MA, USA until his death in October 2020.
