Chris Killip: Skinningrove

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The Photographers’ Gallery in London is staging a retrospective of his work overseen by photographer Ken Grant and curator Tracy Marshall-Grant, which they hope will bring more context to the man behind the images. It is the first exhibition on Killip since he died from cancer in 2020. Killip had spoken about the idea of a retrospective, but it was “only when he started to become ill that the conversations really accelerated”, Grant says. Chris Killip is widely regarded as one of the most influential British photographers of his generation. Born in the Isle of Man in 1946, he began his career as a commercial photographer before turning to his own work in the late 1960s. His book, In Flagrante, a collection of photographs made in the North East of England during the 1970s and early 1980s, is now recognized as a landmark work of documentary photography. Other bodies of work include the series Isle of Man, Seacoal, Skinningrove and Pirelli. My father led two lives that rarely intersected. Family members were often the unwitting participants in indecipherable events that left us with many more questions than answers. Mysterious strangers would show up at our apartment late at night only to depart before dawn without saying a word to anyone other than my father. Peculiar encounters, curious radio transmissions, and unexplained coincidences became the norms of my childhood. 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. View of Skinningrove” by Chris Killip, 1983. courtesy of the artist and the Howard Yezerski Gallery.

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 Of all Chris Killip’s (1946–2020) bodies of work, the photographs he made between 1982 and 1984 in the village of Skinningrove on the North-East coast of England are perhaps his most intimate and encompassing―of the community he photographed and of himself. “Like a lot of tight-knit fishing communities, it could be hostile to strangers, especially one with a camera,” Killip recalled, “Skinningrove fishermen believed that the sea in front of them was their private territory, theirs alone.” 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. Simon Being Taken to Sea for the First Time Since His Father Drowned, Skinningrove, North Yorkshire, 1983. Photograph: Chris Killip

The photographs observe the daily rituals and rendezvous of a village seen by outsiders as fiercely self-sufficient and suspicious to newcomers. Made during a period of de-industrialisation in the North East of England where work was scarce, Skinningrove’s access to the coast for fishing provided a tentative lifeline to the community living there. Scenes such as waiting for the tide, cutting lobster pots, or sitting in parked boats are punctuated by the casual daily interactions and relationships between the people of Skinningrove, which are observed intimately by Killip. Industry, its decline and the transition between the two were recurring themes in his work, but through his humanistic lens, those subjects were always second to the people most impacted by them. Youth on wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1975 Although four images from the series were included in his groundbreaking In Flagrante (1988), Killip resisted collecting all in a single book for over three decades―he had become so invested in them and respectful of his subjects that he needed time and distance to understand their significance. For a photographer whose work was grounded in the urgent value of documenting “ordinary” peoples’ lives, these nuanced images―radiating a vast stillness of light and time, embedded with the granularity of lives lived―reveal Killip’s conviction that no life is ordinary: everyday lives are sublime.

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. Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you. The later 1960s saw Killip moving towards an intermittent but rewarding freelance career assisting London photographers and working for those arriving in the city for short commissions. An early job was revealing in its fluency: the French photographer Jeanloup Sieff arrived with a small bag containing only a camera, lenses and change of clothes, leaving Killip to buy film just ahead of the shoot. His reputation growing, he agreed terms to assist Justin de Villeneuve, who was responsible for the fashion model Twiggy’s corporate image, as they travelled in a Rolls Royce along the King’s Road. Killip would arrange the studio lighting and process for each shoot, leaving de Villeneuve to do little more than press the shutter. Their aim was to have cover shoots for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Queen magazines within six months, a goal they subsequently achieved. 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.My father was a spy during the Cold War. Bilingual in German and English, he worked for the U.S. Air Force and sent agents into East Germany and elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain in the early 1960s. The Need to Know, a photo book, is my exploration of the meager details that emerged from brief and cryptic conversations with my father and my curiosity about Cold War espionage and its impact upon my family at the time. The book will be published by the Blow Up Press of Warsaw, Poland in early October.

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. 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. Born in Douglas on the Isle of Man, Killip worked as freelance commercial photographer in the 1960s, before turning to documentary. In 1975 he was granted a two-year fellowship to photograph in the north-east and the first evidence of how important his images were came in May 1977, when Creative Camera magazine devoted an entire issue to his work in progress.Because Chris knew he was dying, and because he was leaving a lot of the work in the [Martin] Parr Foundation as his archive, he did what I’ve been regarding as his first selection of the retrospective,” says Marshall-Grant. The works on display have been curated from that first ‘edit’ by Killip, and, aside from the oversized pieces in the show, the prints were all made by him in the last decade of his life. “So it’s been quite good because we can already feel quite close to what he wanted,” she adds. Of all Chris Killip’s bodies of work, the photographs he made between 1982 and 1984 in the village of Skinningrove on the north-east coast of England are perhaps his most intimate and encompassing―of the community he photographed and of himself. “Like a lot of tight-knit fishing communities, it could be hostile to strangers, especially one with a camera,” Killip recalled, “Skinningrove fishermen believed that the sea in front of them was their private territory, theirs alone.”

In this short film directed by Michael Almereyda, Killip presents a group of mostly unpublished photographs from the 1980s, taken in and around the village of Skinningrove, in North Yorkshire, and recalls his relationships with the subjects. Almereyda, who has known Killip since 1991, interviewed the photographer for Aperture magazine in 2012 to discuss a retrospective of his career that had been organized in Essen, Germany. This richly illustrated volume is the first critical look at the early career of Arthur Tress, a key proponent of magical realism and staged photography. 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. Arthur Tress (b. 1940) is a singular figure in the landscape of postwar American photography. His seminal series, The Dream Collector, depicts Tress’s interests in dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and the unconscious and established him as one of the foremost proponents of magical realism at a time when few others were doing staged photography.Chris Killip’s work is impassioned, urgent – but it is rarely tragic, despite the circumstances faced by many of the people he photographed, and remained close to, over the course of his life. There are images that will evoke tragedy in some audiences, but then, for Killip, it was never about audiences. 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. The Eye Mama book is a photographic portfolio showcasing the mama narrative and the mama gaze, what female and non-binary photographers see when they look at, and into the home. 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”. The book that I have worked on for the past four years is a photographic re-creation of the intersections and divergences of my father’s secret life and the traditional paternal role he played. The project consists of vernacular photographs, new captures and ephemera to tell a story and investigate a childhood mystery. Ironically, several of the archival photos in the project were photographed by me and my father on separate trips to West Berlin in the winter of 1961 but were only rediscovered recently. The Need to Know is the intersection of the factual and fictional based upon historical research, family archives, my memories, and my imagination.