Photographer who documented Britain’s industrial decline
Chris Killip, who has died aged 74, was one of Britain’s greatest documentary photographers, said The Guardian – known in particular for his “compelling”, often poignant, images of working-class communities in the northeast of England in the 1970s and early 1980s. “He had set out to render meaningful the lives of those who had been marginalised by the end of traditional industry in the region – miners, shipbuilders, fishermen and the like – and he did so through acute observation and empathy.” “In recording their lives, I’m valuing their lives,” he said later, of his mainly unemployed subjects. “These people will not appear in history books because ordinary people don’t. History is done to them. It is not acknowledged that they make history.”
Many of his photographs have acquired near-iconic status: a young skinhead, sitting curled up on a wall, his hands pressed against his head, his eyes tightly closed; a girl playing with a Hula-hoop on a barren, litter-strewn beach; a huge tanker, looming against an empty street; families scavenging for sea coal. With their too-big hand-me-down boots, thick socks and bad teeth, his subjects look so “disenfranchised that ‘working class’ seems almost an aspirational condition”, wrote the poet Don Paterson, in a review in the Financial Times in 2016. But both they and the bleak landscape they inhabit are photographed with “such genuine feeling, that one is almost nostalgic for such photogenic poverty. Almost.”
Christopher Killip was born in 1946 in the pub his parents ran on the Isle of Man. Aged 16, he started work as a trainee hotel manager, and had no thought of becoming a photographer until, at 17, he saw, in an old copy of Paris Match, a Cartier-Bresson image of a small boy proudly carrying bottles of wine. “I was
The Last Ships.
mesmerised,” he recalled, “and slightly tortured, too. I knew it wasn’t a snapshot, but I wasn’t sure what it was and that puzzled me greatly.” Although no one in his family even owned a camera, he decided he’d found his vocation, said The Daily Telegraph. He started out as a beach photographer, then in 1964 moved to London, where he worked as an assistant to Adrian Flowers, the advertising photographer. Then, inspired by a trip to MoMA in New York in 1969, he abandoned commercial work and returned to the Isle of Man, where he started to document its disappearing traditions.
That work led to a commission to take pictures of Huddersfield and Bury St Edmunds for the project
After that, a fellowship sponsored by Northern Gas took him to Newcastle, where he immersed himself in communities struggling with deindustrialisation. “You didn’t have to be a genius to realise how important it was to get in and photograph it before it all fell apart,” he said. “The strange thing is, I didn’t realise how quickly it would go.” He stayed there for a decade. His pictures were often cited as anti-Thatcherite, but he pointed out that his work also covered the Wilson and Callaghan eras. They were all “equally to blame”, he said.
Two Views – Two Cities.
In 1985 Killip’s pictures featured in the influential
Another Country: Photographs of the North East of England
In Flagrante
exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery; and in 1988, his book was accompanied by a solo show at the V&A. From 1991 to 2017, he taught at Harvard. In 2016 his son Matthew, a film-maker, discovered a cache of his father’s old contact sheets, and the results were published as four large-format zines. One of them, featuring photographs of Wallsend and South Shields, was called “I didn’t set out to be the photographer of the English de-Industrial Revolution,”said Killip. “It happened all around me during the time I was photographing.”