By the early 80s, Killip’s portraits were regularly being featured on the cover of the London Review of Books and, in 1985, he was shown alongside his friend Graham Smith in Another Country: Photographs of the North East of England at the Serpentine Gallery in London. This routine was followed each winter between 1970 and 1972, with cheap land and sea travel enabling his trips to London, to his friend Hiroshi Yoda’s darkroom, for long days spent printing and sleeping on the darkroom floor when he was too tired to work further.

Chris Killip, retrospective | Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art

Industries that had once provided stability were eroding, “and you see a certain pulling of the rug from under communities which I think people recognise and feel for”. Paris Match carried their best reports, and it was while flicking through a copy that Killip came across a photograph that would change the course of his life. Smith describes the Amber collective as “a group of idealists guided by a philosophy to create a dialogue with working-class communities, to value and document their culture, to live cheaply and be in control of our own labour. It comprises 20 prints by each photographer and, once again, they will all be exhibited without identifying captions.His picture of a young girl twirling a hula hoop, lost in play on a deserted, litter-strewn beach ( Helen and her Hula-Hoop, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, Northumberland, 1984), perfectly captures her private reverie amid the stark surroundings. Unidentified man and Brian Laidler, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth, January, 1984The exhibition also draws on less familiar work by a photographer whose life and career has proved highly influential in shaping British photography.

Chris Killip Caught in the Act: A Conversation with Photographer Chris Killip

The fifty photographs of In Flagrante serve as the foundation of this exhibition, which includes maquettes, contact sheets, and work prints to reveal the artist’s process. Paul Getty Museum, leads a combined gallery tour of the exhibitions Thomas Annan: Photographer of Glasgow and Now Then: Chris Killip and the Making of In Flagrante. Pick up a multimedia player free of charge in the Museum Entrance Hall or use your own smartphone on our free GettyLink Wi-Fi. It’s harder to take a picture of someone that’s completely unknown and make it interesting, because they’re not famous. When you look at the work in a small sample, you see work which is full of the austerity of the time in which it was photographed,” Grant explains.Several of the people he photographed, they died because of drowning, and Chris was very much part of the aftermath of that situation, making pictures of the families.

‘Rocker hand-picking seacoal‘, Chris Killip, 1984, printed

It comprised about 120 large-format, starkly evocative black-and-white images made in the north-east of England in the late 1970s and early 1980s by the two British photographers during a period of rapid industrial decline. It is a huge thing for Graham that he has allowed this to happen but, in all likelihood, I suspect that it might be the only show he will do for the foreseeable future. Though born on the Isle of Man – which he also photographed (see Tate P20400– P20422) – Killip decided to settle in Newcastle-upon-Tyne when the oil and IMF crises, deindustrialisation and redundancy became the defining conditions of life in northern England. And there’s something good about this, where you have to deal with the fact that I am a photographer and I am here. Angelic Upstarts at a Miners’ Benefit Dance at the Barbary Coast Club, Sunderland, Wearside, 1984, Chris Killip, gelatin silver print.That idealism also seems to belong to another time, another country, but it underpinned two bodies of work that have grown in importance as time has passed.