I am the photographer of the de-industrial revolution in England. I didn’t set out to be this. It’s what happened during the time I was photographing.” —Chris Killip The following year Arbeit/Work was published to coincide with a major retrospective of his work at Museum Folkwang, Essen. It was an honour not granted to him in his lifetime in Britain. The week before his death, he was awarded the Dr Erich Salomon lifetime achievement award for his services to the medium. Then comes three major series, including Killip’s Seacoal project. It was made between 1982 and 1984 in Lynemouth, Northumberland, where coal thrown out to sea from the nearby mine would sometimes wash up again on the shore. People would then often gather it for fuel or selling on. Though Killip photographed the area “intensely”, there remained some distance, Grant explains, but he ended up getting a caravan and living on the beach with the seacoal workers. They became close friends, and Grant says that he was still in touch with them at the end of his life.

I worry about the digital camera. I tell my students to turn off the screen, and they don’t. They think I’m crazy. I’m not crazy. I know what made my pictures better was the anxiety I had, because I didn’t know what I’d just taken. I couldn’t see it, and I always thought it wasn’t good enough, so I’d push a bit harder. I’d try to make a better picture. Chris Killip: My camera’s very visible. It’s big. And there’s something good about this, where you have to deal with the fact that I am a photographer and I am here. Look at this great big contraption. 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. 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”.Clive Dilnot, ‘Chris Killip: The Last Photographer of the Working Class’, afterimage, vol.39, May–June 2012. modern silver gelatin prints from a set of pictures made at the seacoal camp in Lynemouth, Northumberland. Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you. The people I like very much and I’m very close to, sometimes I don’t get a picture that I think does them justice because I know so much about them Life story interview with Chris Killip by Mark Haworth-Booth, 1997, Oral History of British Photography, National Sound Archive, British Library (accessible for UK Higher Education and Further Education institutions only)

When Richard Avedon and Annie Leibovitz take a picture, we recognize the fame of the person. It’s harder to take a picture of someone that’s completely unknown and make it interesting, because they’re not famous. They’re anonymous. Simon Being Taken to Sea for the First Time Since His Father Drowned, Skinningrove, North Yorkshire, 1983. Photograph: Chris Killip He moved to the US in 1991, having been offered a visiting lectureship at Harvard, where he was later appointed professor emeritus in the department of visual and environmental studies, a post he held until his retirement in 2017. In the summer of 1991, he was also invited to the Aran Islands to host a workshop and returned to the west of Ireland a few years later to begin making a body of colour work that would be published in 2009 in a book called Here Comes Everybody, its title borrowed from James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake. In 1991 I was telephoned out of the blue by Alfred Guzzetti, chair of Harvard’s Visual and Environmental Studies Department. The faculty wanted to appoint Chris as professor of photography but were worried: he seemed ‘difficult’. I agreed but said that, however difficult Chris could be, I’d always found it worth persevering. How clever of Harvard to appoint him. Chris worked there from 1991 until his retirement in 2017. He was a natural, giving his students time, attention and brilliant ways into the core of the medium – for example, by comparing the photographs of Mexico by, on the one hand Paul Strand (Communist but ‘patronising’) and on the other, Manuel Alvarez Bravo (local and ‘accepting complexity’). He brought David Goldblatt to Harvard to work on his exhibition and book Structures of Dominion and Democracy. Chris found teaching – and the administration that goes with it – so all-consuming that his serious photography came to an end. However, he’d worked so intensely from 1969 onwards that he was understandably burned out creatively by 1988.You’re going to get a picture by being there. It’s never easy. Sometimes you’re good and they’re good…I’d never seen them before and I never saw them again.” —Chris Killip Aged 74, Chris died peacefully at home in Cambridge, Mass., his wife Mary and son Matt at his bedside. Thank you, Chris, for everything. Further reading He is survived by Mary, his son, Matthew, from a previous relationship with the Czech photographer Markéta Luskačová, his stepson, Joshua, two granddaughters, Millie and Celia, and a brother, Dermott. Elsewhere is his work made in the North Yorkshire fishing village of Skinningrove, “a place which was willfully kept by the people who lived there unkempt”, says Grant, describing how people fished and worked in the local iron smelter. “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.” Family on a Sunday walk, Skinningrove, 1982 Bever, Skinningrove, North Yorkshire, 1983

Later, I wanted to get away from this very formal thing and changed my photography, and so I used a plate camera where you had a cape. I had a thumb press, so I’d be looking at you, but you never knew when I was going to take the picture. My caravan was like a café and it [had] nice light because the windows were on both sides. It was a good place to photograph.” —Chris Killip The Retention Period depends on the type of the saved data. Each client can choose how long Google Analytics retains data before automatically deleting it.

Exhibition Accessibility

Chris Killip photographed in the north of England during the 1970s and 80s, when the country’s three main heavy industries—steelworks, shipyards, and coal mines—went into decline. Killip calls the resulting book, In Flagrante, a “portrait of working class struggles at that time.”

For the next few years, Killip worked at night in his father’s pub and, by day, travelled the island shooting his first series of landscapes and portraits. The island had become a tax haven for outsiders and Killip rightly sensed that its traditional jobs were under threat. He set out to evoke that disappearing way of life and, in doing so, set the tone for much of what was to follow, not just in terms of his choice of subject matter, but in his formal rigour and deeply immersive, slowly evolving approach. In 1991 Killip was invited to be a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University. In 1994 he was made a tenured professor and was department chair from 1994-98. He retired from Harvard in December 2017 and continued to live in Cambridge, MA, USA, until his death in October, 2020. 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. It was a hugely influential exhibition that prepared the ground for In Flagrante, launched at an exhibition of the same name at the Victoria and Albert Museum three years later. It took him a long time to get in with the Seacolers. They had no idea who he was and he faced violence the first time he tried to photograph them," he told ITV Tyne Tees. Killip first attempted to photograph Seacoal Beach in Lynemouth, Northumberland, England, in 1976, but it took him six years to gain the trust of the people who worked there. Living, on and off, in a caravan on Lynemouth’s Seacoal camp from 1982 to 1984, Killip immersed himself in their struggles to survive. Fourteen images from the Seacoal series were also included in Killip’s groundbreaking book In Flagrante (1988).

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Chris Killip began photographing the people of Lynemouth seacoal beach in the north east of England in 1982, after nearly seven years of failed efforts to obtain their consent. During 1983 to 1984 he lived in a caravan on the seacoal camp and documented the life, work and the struggle to survive on the beach, using his unflinching style of objective documentation. Fifty of the one hundred and twenty four images published here, were first shown in 1984 at the Side Gallery in Newcastle and others were an important element of Killip’s ground-breaking and legendary book In Flagrante, published four years later. Mr Killip later met a Seacoaler who remembered him at Appleby Horse Fair and he re-introduced the photographer to the community. He moved into a caravan and began documenting their lives. The exhibition begins with Killip’s work in the Isle of Man, where he was from, followed by his photographs made in the north of England in the early 1970s. In these images, Grant says, “you get a sense of someone who’s really excited about discovering photography and what photography could do, but also excited about moving through the north of England and figuring out what was taking place there”. Gordon in the water, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth,1983 Helen and her hula hoop, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, Northumbria, 1984 In 1971, Lee Witkin, a New York gallery owner, commissioned a limited edition portfolio of Killip’s Isle of Man photographs. The advance allowed him to continue working independently and, in 1974, he was commissioned to photograph Huddersfield and Bury St Edmunds, which resulted in an exhibition, Two Views, Two Cities, held at the art galleries of each city. The following year he was given a two-year fellowship by Northern Arts to photograph the north-east. He worked in Tyneside for the next 15 years, living in a flat in Bill Quay, Gateshead, and steadily creating the body of work that would define him as a documentary photographer.