How do certain photographs come to define the way we remember an entire era? Chris Killip spent much of his career photographing the people and communities of Northern England during the 1970s and 1980s, capturing a region undergoing profound social and economic change. His images are unflinching, but never detached: hardship sits alongside tenderness, dignity and moments of unexpected beauty.
In this extract from Chris Killip: North, edited by Mark Holborn, Holborn reflects on the enduring power of Killip’s photographs, their ability to encapsulate entire eras, and the friendship and working relationship that grew alongside the making of Killip’s photobooks In Flagrante and North.
© Chris Killip Photography Trust / Magnum Photos. Raby Street store, Byker, Tyneside, 1975
The power of individual photographs shifts with the passage of time. The most striking images become embedded in our memory and start to coalesce with our recollection of whole eras. Their power is dependent on the skill with which they have been seized in passing, with all the blur and grain that film stock offers from the pre-digital age, or else with the shape and geometry that have been precisely assembled through the viewfinder. The scene is often framed and ordered in a fraction of a second. From that moment, entire decades can be encapsulated. Certain photographs persist and become impossible to eradicate, granting permanence to what was fleeting. Such pictures become almost monumental, as if they were historical markers.
Looking through the complete archive of Chris Killip’s work recently, I have seen many pictures for the first time. Those that I already know seem more deeply etched in my memory than ever. They have become defining emblems of despair coupled with lyricism and tenderness from late in the last century. There is a tension running throughout. Killip’s visual language does not arise with the photojournalistic convention of the Leica or 35mm view. His work is larger in the frame, and inherently more slowly measured and considered. A pictorial grace flows. The virtuoso compositions give you defined planes of foreground, mid-ground and background, all in perfect focus. At times, especially in some of those most memorable pictures, the elegance is so pronounced it almost contradicts the starkness of the reality he is describing.
Killip’s visual language does not arise with the photojournalistic convention of the Leica or 35mm view. His work is larger in the frame, and inherently more slowly measured and considered. A pictorial grace flows. Mark Holborn
© Chris Killip Photography Trust / Magnum Photos. Bus shelter, North Shields, Tyneside, 1975
The picture with which his book In Flagrante opens is of a painter with his canvas and easel on a bleak northern shoreline. Maybe it is a reflection on his struggle to depict this battered coast, marking an imagined canvas line by line – a self-portrait of sorts. The painter’s feet are firm and grounded, the easel, like Killip’s tripod, upright in the wind. There is nothing ephemeral here: the work is born from knowledge. Killip lived for months in a caravan on a Northumberland beach to photograph Seacoal, perhaps his most memorable and graceful work, where the harshness of gathering from industrial detritus for survival was tempered by his observation of tenderness. Horses are seen as more than beasts of burden. Dogs are embraced. Children, as in so much of his work, are a focal point. On this shore we witness life on the very margin, the frailty of individuals and a colossal historical passage.
The photographs that constitute the main body of this book are drawn from the North East of England between 1975 and 1986. They come from a time when shipbuilding was still a point of pride on Tyneside; from a body of work in Huddersfield in the early seventies; from work at Askam-in-Furness, on the Cumbrian coast, in 1981 and 1982; from Skinningrove, a fishing community on the North Yorkshire coast, from 1982 to 1984; and from the Seacoal beach close to the Lynemouth colliery, which closed in 1994. Killip photographed on this beach between 1976 and 1984, the year of the miners’ strike, which he also documented. The struggles he witnessed were not those of opposition to Conservative power – far too simplistic an observation. These photographs were made in Britain under both Labour and Conservative governments. His political sympathies may appear self-evident, but these pictures transcend the divisions between Left and Right. Despite the passion of the work, as the book begins you sense a discipline, even a neutrality, worthy of a survey project, or as if Walker Evans were wandering in a pre-war landscape. Could these pictures be of our time?
The sequence ends on the beach at Lynemouth, and the historical parallels are explicit. Are we still in the shadow of the late nineteenth century, as if in the depths of the Industrial Revolution, or are we present at its demise?
© Chris Killip Photography Trust / Magnum Photos. Wallsend, Tyneside, 1976
The photographs that constitute the main body of this book are drawn from the North East of England between 1975 and 1986. They come from a time when shipbuilding was still a point of pride on Tyneside; from a body of work in Huddersfield in the early seventies; from work at Askam-in-Furness, on the Cumbrian coast, in 1981 and 1982; from Skinningrove, a fishing community on the North Yorkshire coast, from 1982 to 1984; and from the Seacoal beach close to the Lynemouth colliery, which closed in 1994. Mark Holborn
My view of Killip’s work is the outcome of a now distant encounter more than forty years ago. Our first meeting was at a pub in Ladbroke Grove in 1980. Killip was approachable, but had already established his references, his personal hierarchy of figures he considered significant. In addition to Evans, his list would, no doubt, have included Paul Strand, Josef Koudelka and, later, David Goldblatt. He was older, wiser and more knowledgeable than me. He was an artist. He made pictures. I absorbed them and arranged them. But he came back to me.
[...]
By late 1986, I was back in London after three or four years in New York and suffering from a sense of displacement. In the spring of 1987, Killip invited me to come north and visit him in Gateshead. I had been up to the Side Gallery, where Killip’s influence was pivotal, earlier in the eighties. As an outsider, I was thrilled by Newcastle and Gateshead. He could not have been more gracious. He made it clear we would work together. The relationship had also shifted agreeably from the professional to the personal. Killip’s show with Graham Smith, ‘Another Country’, opened at the Serpentine in London in 1985. I was still in America at the time. David Godwin, who later became the head of Secker & Warburg, was impressed.
© Chris Killip Photography Trust / Magnum Photos. North East England, 1976
In light of such important work, he saw the opportunity to begin publishing photographic books. I was called in by both Killip and Godwin to start on what was to become In Flagrante. Killip has suggested the In Flagrante sequence was the outcome of several arduous editing sessions. My memory differs. I recall Killip coming to my house in South London with a box of work prints and a preliminary dummy, which we discarded. We arranged the pictures on the floor of my main room. The sequence was not simple. I continued after Killip left, and in a second session I believe we completed the work. I made the dummy, establishing the sizing of the pictures, on my kitchen table using work prints, card and tape.
[...]
I continued to travel between London and New York. I even met Killip on the street in downtown New York. Somewhere along the line he invited me to Harvard, and I addressed a lecture theatre of his students for three hours on the nature of the photographic sequence and historical narrative. There were a few postcards or short notes between us. I sent him a Daido Moriyama book from Tokyo, but we rarely spoke again until, of course, it was too late. Killip was able to see almost all his individual projects published, and there has been a posthumous publication of Skinningrove. His various bodies of work have been gathered in the ambitious publication and exhibition, Chris Killip 1946–2020. This endeavour deserves our gratitude for the systematic record and context it offers. Looking back, I see now that the audacity of In Flagrante lay in the breadth of what he embraced, and the consequent juxtapositions. The book suggested a common landscape, however diverse the subjects, or a disparate world under a common light. The monochrome jacket of the book’s cover wrapped these extraordinary elements as if they constituted a dispatch received from the combat zone.
© Chris Killip Photography Trust / Magnum Photos. Byker, Tyneside, 1976
Killip’s son, Matthew, granted me the keys to the archive. I wanted to go back to everything that came before In Flagrante and to re-lay a path. The new book would need a point of opening and a finale. These were to be on the Isle of Man, Killip’s homeland, together with an ascent and descent of Croagh Patrick in Co. Mayo, Ireland, and a similar pilgrimage to Máméan in Co. Galway. The geographical variations were no more than stepping stones or border crossings to and from a great flow of work I have titled simply North. Although images from the Isle of Man and Ireland lie firmly outside this body of northern work, they frame the whole sequence. Croagh Patrick is an ancient site of Irish pilgrimage. St Patrick is said to have fasted for forty days on its summit. Its sacred roots lie in the mists of myth and prehistory. In the fifth century, a church was erected on the summit. The pilgrimage today represents the perpetuity of the lineage of the early church. Bathed in clouds, Killip’s images of the slopes are the antithesis of the grounded and vividly descriptive works that form the main body of this book. These prefatory and concluding images are emblematic: in contrast to his customarily impeccable constructions, his photographs here have a roughness, reflecting the physical ordeal of the journey. Their intensity lies in their symbolism of a wider human struggle, which the body of the book addresses full on. The column of pilgrims is echoed in the monument for the Jarrow marchers at the very end.
There remains a deep divide on this island between North and South. For too many outside the North, that region remains an unknown, while the South seems sheltered and warm – an illusion. Mark Holborn
[...]
We live in a world as fractured as that Killip witnessed forty or fifty years ago. Our consciousness is stalked by the fury of our divisions. Too often we occupy closed worlds and are either too frightened or too complacent to wander. There remains a deep divide on this island between North and South. For too many outside the North, that region remains an unknown, while the South seems sheltered and warm – an illusion. Stare at the pictures and you might recognize a place that touches you with the most intimate memory of an earlier era, or else, gather yourself because you are, indeed, looking beyond the invisible borderline to what Killip himself once suggested was another country.
Words by Mark Holborn.
Chris Killip: North edited by Mark Holborn is available now.
