“The Interest Is in What You Can Show People, What You Can Reveal”: Retrospective on the Photography of Chris Killip
2024; Duke University Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/15476715-11021016
ISSN1558-1454
Autores Tópico(s)Urban Planning and Governance
ResumoOn an ordinary midweek afternoon in February 2023, I attended a retrospective exhibition of photographer Chris Killip's work at the Photographers' Gallery in central London. Killip was one of the most influential British photographers of the late twentieth century, and his work provides a startling portrayal of working-class life. Curated by Tracy Marshall-Grant and Ken Grant, the retrospective consisted of over 150 photographs spanning Killip's career from work in his native Isle of Man in the early 1970s to the various projects that went into his most famous work, In Flagrante (1988). The Killip retrospective was one of the gallery's most popular recent exhibitions. Going into the exhibition without a formal background in photography criticism, I discovered later that I shared with experts some observations and reactions to Killip's work. I consequently read contemporary reviewers' assessments, which I discuss here, but this review is largely my personal impressions of Killip's work and my effort to locate him within his artistic and political contexts.Christopher David Killip was born on July 11, 1946, in Douglas, capital of the Isle of Man. He died in October 2020 at the age of seventy-four after a battle with lung cancer. Killip's parents ran a pub in Douglas and he worked as a trainee hotel manager after leaving school at sixteen. When he was almost eighteen, Killip worked as a beach photographer, earning enough money in summer 1964 to move to London. By October 1964 he had secured work in advertising photography; he soon went freelance. Killip had an epiphany on seeing his first photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1969. (There were no photo galleries in England at that time.)For Killip the realization "that photography was valid for its own sake had a profound effect on me. . . . It wasn't the thought that photography was or wasn't art; that wasn't my concern. It was that it was valued for its own sake. And that gave me the confidence to go back and not think of photography in the same way."1 Back in the Isle of Man, Killip photographed during the day, working evenings in his father's pub. The owner whose New York gallery had first inspired Killip commissioned and paid in advance for a portfolio of his Isle of Man work in 1971. A year later Killip secured an Arts Council commission to photograph Huddersfield (a northern industrial town in West Yorkshire) and Bury St. Edmunds (a market town in Suffolk, eastern England).The event that really catalyzed Killip's career came in 1975 when the funding body Northern Arts awarded him a two-year fellowship to photograph in northeastern England, necessitating Killip's move to Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In 1977 Killip cofounded and became first director of the Side Gallery in Newcastle, located a stone's throw from the quayside area and the river Tyne.2 A year earlier, Killip embarked on a project to photograph workers collecting sea coal in Lynemouth, on the Northumberland coast, north of Newcastle.3 By the early 1980s, Lynemouth had formed a community of forty or fifty locals and travelers in a permanent camp near the beach, selling the sea coal they harvested.4 It took six years for Killip to gain the locals' trust, but once he had done so, he lived sporadically in a caravan near the beach, becoming, between 1983 and 1984, immersed in this marginalized community's life.5 In 1984, the Side Gallery displayed seventy images from "Seacoal."6In the same period Killip also photographed the remote fishing community of Skinningrove in the southernmost reaches of the region, some eighty miles from Lynemouth, and beyond another postindustrial city, Middlesbrough. When the miners' strike broke out in March 1984, Killip suspended all his other projects and began recording the conflict in the Northeast, taking some five thousand images. On the miners' return to work a year later, Killip donated his photographs to a local branch of the union. Only a handful were ever exhibited or published.7In April 1985, Killip first visited the Station, an anarcho-punk venue just across the river Tyne, in Gateshead. "Amazed by the energy and feel of the place," he began to attend as many Saturdays as he could.8 Selections from all of Killip's northeastern photography was displayed in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and published as In Flagrante in 1988. (Killip published his first book, Isle of Man, in 1980.) In 1989, Pirelli UK commissioned Killip to photograph its tire factory in the Midlands. Two years later, he moved to the United States. He worked at Harvard University until 2017, when he retired as professor of visual and environmental studies. He remained living in the United States until his death in 2020.Killip's black-and-white images depict a certain beauty in the faces of both his Isle of Man and northern England subjects.9 Many capture an element of their subject's personality or character. The images portray a panorama of dignity, courage, fortitude, and, at times, defiance. They reflect working-class struggle, toil, and misery. Many convey a sense of defeat, destruction, and decay. The faces show little joy. Precious few smile or laugh. Humor, that essential human mechanism for coping with extreme adversity, seems almost entirely absent.10 A girl skipping on the waste ground screws her face into a serious look of concentration rather than the simple enjoyment of uncomplicated childhood one might expect (see fig. 1). The dentured smile of a man in the west end of Newcastle betrays a grimace as he balances a child on his shoulders. The child has a similarly pained expression. Strikingly, Killip captures a few scenes of people on the beach who seem as though they are enjoying themselves; a few people actually smile. Those who do are a group of North Shields old women celebrating the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977 and some of the people at a celebration of the wedding of Charles and Diana in 1981.Hope is elusive in Killip's work. Even the images hinting at resistance are rendered futile. For example, consider two images that bookend In Flagrante, a series of photographs Killip made in northern England from 1973 to 1985. An image near the beginning of the series depicts a red-brick-terraced street scene in the north Tyneside shipbuilding town of Wallsend, maybe of a set of Tyneside flats, a regionally specific style of working-class housing built of red brick. Two indistinct figures walk the snow-covered street. Someone has written on a wall the defiant slogan "Don't vote; prepare for revolution. CPB (M-L) [Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist)]." In an image near the end of In Flagrante, the communist slogan remains, but the people and a large slice of the housing have gone, replaced by piles of rubble. It is a powerful image of defeat, hopelessness, and marginalization.To my mind the only hope Killip offers lies in the punks, who are frequently (and irritatingly) referred to as "skinheads" in commentators' reviews from the 1980s. (Some did have fully shaven "skinheads," but they were anarcho-punks; conflating them specifically glosses over the significance of the politics of anarcho-punk.) Killip's depictions of this self-organized, anarchist-run youth culture convey their energy and anger brilliantly; that "the hippies now wear black" means we probably do not miss much color even with Killip's insistence on using black-and-white film.11 Killip captured these images at the Station, which he remembered as "an anarcho-punk venue set up in an old police social club in Gateshead" that lay just on the other side of the High Level Bridge over the mighty river Tyne.12Anarchist youth aside, I find the overt politics of the period underrepresented in the Killip retrospective at the Photographers' Gallery—and bizarrely so, given that he extensively photographed key periods of late twentieth-century working-class protest, such as the 1984–85 miners' strike. Of course, the region was much more than its fast-shrinking pool of coal miners, generally regarded as rather conservative in the immediate post-1945 period but catalyzed into militancy in the 1980s by aggressive government policy and local left-wing leadership that threatened the miners' livelihoods and quality of life. But to exclude them almost entirely seems peculiar.Interestingly, the only exception to royalty-induced mirth I noticed in the exhibition is one single photo from the 1984 Durham miner's gala, an annual event that in normal times occasioned considerable alcohol-fueled merriment among the northeastern working classes.13 This photo is one of only two that Killip shot from the gala and one of only four photographs in the exhibition directly related to the region's coal miners. Their bitter, protracted dispute with the Thatcher government was only a few months old when Killip photographed the annual gala.14 One other exception is the powerful image of the 1984 police occupation of the mining village of Easington, later the location for the hit film Billy Elliott (2000).15 Elsewhere in Killip's work the overt politics is complex; at the time of the IRA hunger strikers' action in the Maze Prison in 1981, the graffiti on a North Shields (on north Tyneside) housing estate wall reads, "Bobby Sands greedy Irish pig," with "Smash IRA" daubed near it (see fig. 2).The ways people's place and their work affect them physically as well as emotionally fascinated Killip. Fired by his "conviction that no life is ordinary: everyday lives are sublime"—and clearly echoing a "history from below" sensibility—Killip sought to explore how much could be revealed by the camera.16 He pulled out "practically all the stops of social realism as a form of expression." Revealingly, in a BBC radio interview in August 1985 Killip asserted, "I have no interest really in photography. The interest is in what you can show people, what you can reveal." If photography was somehow rendered impossible, Killip vowed he would find another medium serving the same end.17 He worked exclusively in black-and-white, using mostly 4 × 5 film, because color distracted too much from the content of the image.18 Killip's prints were sometimes displayed as large as four by five feet.19Killip gave a fascinating insight into his approach in the early 1990s: When I go take a picture now . . . and I look through mv viewfinder and recognize the composition, I don't want to take it. . . . You're always trying to break the photographic hand on it. When you recognize it, you know you're recognizing it as a photograph, which means you're recognizing it from an acquired view, an established photo history view, of what a photograph is. It's only when it frightens you when you look through the viewfinder, when it makes you nervous, when you're not sure, but you're moved to take it anyway—those are the pictures that ultimately interest me the most. It's only the point that you reach when you're pushing yourself hard that I find interesting.20Killip's mission and method was clear, too, in his approach to various projects. He said, of his first visit to Lynemouth to photograph the sea coalers in 1976, "The first thing the men did was try and run me down with their horses, and it's not a difficult feat when the target is lugging a plate camera and tripod."21 Not until February 1983 did he receive a phone call from one of their number saying that a fence had gone up preventing the removal of sea coal from the beach. Killip went to photograph the sea coalers' protests, and soon moved into their camp. The protracted and delicate process that led to Killip photographing the Lynemouth sea coalers' lives testified to his passion and commitment (see figs. 3 and 4). His 1988 In Flagrante exhibition included a photograph album of one of the sea coal families, who, to Killip's pleasure, had incorporated his photos into their family album. "The photo that meant one thing in Killip's working book had an entirely different meaning for the family; in a sense, the inclusion of his picture made him [Killip] part of the family."22Similarly, of working at Skinningrove, Killip recalled, "Like a lot of tight-knit fishing communities, it could be hostile to strangers, especially one with a camera." Yet this did not prevent him from taking some wonderfully human photographs of the community there. Only four images from this series went into In Flagrante (1988), tellingly because Killip "had become so invested in them and respectful of his subjects that he needed time and distance to understand their significance." The images just published in 2023 were first revealed as a newspaper in 2018 that, characteristically, Killip "personally and anonymously put into every letterbox in the village."23Regarding his work at the anarcho-punk venue the Station, Killip recalled, It was totally different, run for and by the people who went there. Every Saturday that I could, I photographed there. Nobody ever asked me where I was from or even who I was. A 39-year-old with cropped white hair, always wearing a suit, with pockets stitched inside the jacket to hold my slides. With a 4 × 5 camera around my neck and a Norman flash and its battery around my waist, I must have looked like something out of a 1950s B movie.24Killip's work owed much to that of French humanist Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004), who photographed in the Northeast in the 1970s and whose £25,000 prize Killip won (for his body of work to that point) in 1989. The In Flagrante exhibition also showed some of the Frenchman's images, as it was Cartier-Bresson (ironically, perhaps, "the photographer of joy"), who first made Killip "aware of photography as a means of expression."25 The shadow of the most famous British photographer of the twentieth century, Bill Brandt (who died in 1983), also loomed large.26 It was Brandt's work that Killip first saw in New York in the late 1960s.27 One of Killip's Seacoal images was redolent of Brandt's 1947 Coal Searcher Going Home to Jarrow.28 Jarrow was a town on South Tyneside infamously "murdered" when the local shipyards were shut down in the 1930s depression.29 The local MP, Ellen Wilkinson, led the famous Jarrow March to London in autumn 1936 demanding government action. But it was only rearmament for war that brought a short-lived upturn in local fortunes.30Art critic Waldemar Januszczak remarked about In Flagrante, "The industrial north-east has attracted more than its fair share of melodramatic black-and-white photographers trying to out-Brandt Brandt by piling on the soot and squalor. Fortunately, Chris Killip is not one of them." Instead, Januszczak praised Killip's ability to "sniff-out psychological unease" that "clears him of all charges of photographic social-work and distinguishes him from most British photographers."31 He compared Killip's work to that of American photographer Diane Arbus. The critics saw echoes, too, of Arbus's fellow Americans Paul Strand and Walker Evans as well as the German August Sander.32 But the specificity of time and place in Killip's work set him apart from earlier social documentary photographers.33 A more critical commentator, William Bishop, remarked that Killip's work was difficult to differentiate from Graham Smith's in their major joint exhibition: "Perhaps the point is not to bother to try."34Killip's later 1970s and 1980s studies of broadly northeastern working-class life were widely and sympathetically viewed, even though black-and-white was going out of fashion in this genre of British photography: contemporaries like Anna Fox and Paul Reas began deploying color to explore the new, garish, and alienating Thatcherite world of consumerism.35 Killip's recognition that his work reflected a preoccupation with innocence and its loss was reflected in Susan Kismaric's remark that the "children who dominate the pages of In Flagrante stand little chance of a future different from the realized lives of their parents."36 Killip's work certainly left a strong impression on many. Jeremy Seabrook (1988) a significant commentator on the working class and the unemployment and poverty of Thatcher's Britain saw in Killip's work images of "depowerment, disabling and loss" in capitalism.37 For art critic Marina Vaizey, Killip's was "a terrifying vision, yet unavoidably beautiful in its silvery-grey tones" that contrasted favorably with contemporaneous exhibitions by "chic cult photographer" Robert Mapplethorpe ("Where Killip has a committed passion, Mapplethorpe merely looks into a mirror with impeccable technique") and Ralph Gibson ("bloodless stuff, arty but not art").38Even Killip's critics accepted the power of his work: Bishop branded Killip's 1985 joint exhibition "a stabbing revelation of effects of situation on malleable human beings."39 It was "a powerful shout, as from another country—in a rather gloomy voice, but perhaps not unjustifiably so." For Bishop the melancholy was even observable in Killip's "skinheads" (actually punks), "because when the music stops they still have to face the environment they are in." Many others commented similarly. Nina Prescod regarded In Flagrante as a "metaphor for the Britain of those left behind by the new industrial revolution."40 And while there was some tenderness in the Seacoal images, "dignity is hard to find and, consequently, the effect of studying these views is a depressing one." Marina Vaizey saw the Northeast depicted as "in almost terminal decay": "These are often photographs of silent screams, the odd moment of defiance found only in fading graffiti, otherwise a grim, passive endurance, lightened only by the occasional gesture of unguarded affection."41 American writer Daniel Wolff witnessed an "unremittingly bleak picture of current social conditions" wherein Killip documents "a crushed population, living in the shell of an industrial wasteland, scavenging for food."42 The gloominess was naturally tied to a sense of defeat, given the increasing triumph of the Thatcher governments, especially after the Conservative electoral consolidation of 1983, boosted by an upturning economy and garnished with the jingoism of military victory over the Argentine junta in the 1982 Falklands conflict. For Bishop, Killip's gloomy depiction (facilitated by Killip's living in the "Cinderella land of public patronage," which allowed for an independent stance distinct from commercial journalism) was simply exaggeration, a technique widely used to make a point as strong as possible.43For the critics, this raised an ontological question: To what extent was Killip's representation of northeastern working-class life the truth? Januszczak had no concerns: "The ordinary life of Geordie folk emerges brilliant and clear, as if it has merely had a coat of fine varnish applied."44 On the other hand, Killip's (1988) own short introduction to In Flagrante highlighted his subjectivity: "The objective history of England doesn't amount to much if you don't believe in it, and I don't, and I don't believe that anyone in these photographs does either as they face the reality of deindustrialization in a system which regards their lives as disposable."45 The images thus deliberately transmit Killip's own "sorrow and anger" in his "subjective book about my time in England."For Liz Heron, truthfulness or representativeness were unimportant: "While they describe recognizable aspects of impoverished Britain in the 1980s, their singularities dislodge literal readings. Killip works in metaphors, fashioning a poetic vocabulary for the inexpressible sense of loss and dislocation experienced by those on the margins. [Killip] stands back from what he photographs, making no icons. . . . There are no victims, no heroes."46 Heron saw Killip's subjects as "rendered disposable by the fluctuation of power elsewhere, they have their own energy. . . . This is what's most tragic about these photographs: their sheer dynamism—of human lives held in check, stopped up, diminished by their shrunken possibilities."47 Marina Vaizey agreed: Killip's work demonstrated "brilliantly how photographers who aim at being more than illustrators must manipulate their subjects to suggest reality and spontaneity."48 Bishop, however, demurred: "The sincerity in these photographs is not in question," but has Killip's "enthusiasm for the subject" led to certain images being "selected as representing this region" while other images were passed over?"49 Asking this question opened up a second one for Bishop: Killip sought to establish the fact of England being two countries, North and South, but "doesn't an exhibition like this [ . . . ] reinforce stereotypes and cliched perceptions?"The gloom, and the subjectivity informing it, surely had a wider purpose. For leftist Jeremy Seabrook, Killip's work was overtly political, as it was "bearing witness" to the plight of his subjects.50 Seabrook accepted that "it may be that images of powerlessness, functionless and the violence done to people work against the collusive conspiracy that such a society embodies the highest human freedoms." But he also pointed to ethical issues, hinting at what later became known as "poverty porn," and remarked on capitalism's remarkable ability to co-opt apparently subversive forces: "Even the most painful pictures that speak of despair and dereliction necessarily become also part of the gallery of artefacts for consumption by this omnivorous, autophagous culture." Bearing witness was necessary, Seabrook concluded, but—in the context of Thatcherism's assault on (some) working-class institutions, and on the sense of working-classness itself—doing so was perhaps not enough.Wolff took this further, remarking on the "powerless anger these photographs conjure up and the incredible urge the viewer has to do something: if nothing else, to find some fitting punishment for those who have conspired to kill hope."51 But Wolff pointed to Marxist John Berger's (and Sylvia Grant) introductory comments in In Flagrante that "Chris Killip is adamantly aware that a better future for the photographed is unlikely"; that none of the major British political parties and "not even the Communist Manifesto is going to address the plight of the childhoods, adolescences, virilities, motherhoods and old ages written off here." Wolff asked, "If there's no hope of change, why are we looking at these people?" Still, he conceded, "books like Killip's, while they may not change anything, can serve as reminders until the time for change arrives." A more recent academic study draws a distinction between what is curiously dubbed the left neoliberal humanitarianism of photographer Sebastião Salgado with the "class aesthetic" evident in the work of Killip and Black American female photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier, offering some useful—albeit not entirely convincing—discussion of "subjectivity" in Killip's work.Killip's Side Gallery (and cinema) is still going strong.52 In 2005 the "Side," appropriately enough, hosted the first "Projectile" Anarchist film festival, in a police-cordoned Quayside area (due to a Labour government conference in Gateshead). It attracted attendees from around Britain and farther afield. Subsequent incarnations of "Projectile" were hosted by the anarchist-inspired "Star and Shadow" cinema, which, while it has changed venues (it has fled the rapidly gentrifying Ouseburn area on the eastern side of Newcastle), remains the closest contemporary equivalent to Killip's favorite 1980s anarcho-punk haunt, the Station (see fig. 5). Culturally, recent years have seen the mainstream breakthrough of Sam Fender, the Geordie Bruce Springsteen, whose songs' themes relating to northeastern working-class life offer a strong sense of Killip's work.53What can Killip's work tell us about contemporary British politics? The answer is complex. First, we return to the point about the representativeness of the region. While Killip did record the declining regional shipbuilding industry, and the coal miners' struggle, much of his most famous work relates to communities on the margins: literally in terms of being on the coast, but also in terms of the rise and fall of the region as an industrial powerhouse. For example, Killip recalled that when he first saw the sea coalers at work in January 1976, he "recognized the coalmine and power station above it but nothing else. The beach beneath me was full of activity with horses and carts backed into the sea. Men were standing in the sea next to the carts, using small wire nets attached to poles to fish out the coal from the water beneath them. The place confounded time; here the Middle Ages and the twentieth century intertwined [my emphasis]."54 The very thing that attracted Killip so much to Lynemouth was precisely that there was something preindustrial about the lives lived there. Like E. P. Thompson seeking to afford dignity to those workers whose livelihoods were threatened by the first industrial revolution, so Killip was rescuing sea coalers from the "enormous condescension of posterity."55 Perhaps appropriately, the last northeastern colliery to close (in 2005) was Ellington, which served the Killip sea coalers at Lynemouth. Now sea coalers are a rare breed indeed, with some nineteen still working one beach in the region in 2015, at Blackhall, Hartlepool.That much of Killip's published work seems more concerned with communities where the industrial revolution did not quite happen, compounded by his use of black and white, means many of his images look like they could have been taken in the 1930s. As the last page of In Flagrante Two (2016) reminds us, Killip was recording working-class life and struggle under both Labour and Conservative governments in the 1970s and 1980s. Labour dominated power in local government across the Northeast throughout Killip's time. The "slum" clearance devastation that Killip charts in the 1970s was the last ditch of the modernist, self-styled visionaries of the 1960s under Labour council leader T. Dan Smith (who wanted to make Newcastle the "Brasilia of the North"). It ignominiously dissolved into a corruption scandal in the 1970s.56Yet Killip's images also point forward to the early 2000s and to the "Going for Growth" that necessitated the leveling of good-quality, beautifully constructed working-class housing in the west end of Newcastle. These were late Victorian terraces where the former Tyneside engineering workers (and some coal miners) had lived. A "modernizing" New Labour–inspired Newcastle city council destroyed them despite vehement protests from working-class people who still lived in and valued their communities. These Labour council efforts at gentrification (i.e., moving the poor out of sight) largely failed, albeit because of their own incoherence rather than the resistance the plan encountered. Incidentally, this west end—of Newcastle, not London—was sung about by local lads the Pet Shop Boys, in what must be the single most haunting popular music representation of the Thatcher years. "West End Girls," from 1984, even includes a line referencing Edmund Wilson's exploration of revolutionary thought, To the Finland Station.57 In the current west end of Newcastle, only a small proportion of that controversially demolished housing has been replaced, by cheap and ugly modern buildings. There remains considerable brownfield emptiness.Notwithstanding the gentrification and sanitization of the Quayside area that the Side Cinema looks out on, a modern-day Killip could still take very similar photographs in the same areas he visited in the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps some of the clothes might look different (though the 1980s donkey jackets worn by his subjects, for example, seem to have made a recent comeback). This point speaks to continuity; deindustrialization in the Northeast really began after the Great War; it has a long and painful history. In that sense, perhaps, it is not surprising that the Northeast that J. B. Priestley wrote about in 1934's English Journey (and the wider industrial North that Orwell brilliantly documented in The Road to Wigan Pier in 1936) is recognizable in Killip's work. It remains recognizable now, another forty-odd years later.More specifically, there is a fairly obvious sense in which working-class experience has changed. The specter of unemployment scarred the 1980s as the Thatcher governments abandoned the postwar consensus aim of maintaining full employment in an effort to reduce public spending and tackle rampant inflation. Unemployment rocketed to over three million (11.9 percent) in early 1984 and remained stubbornly high in many deindustrializing, predominantly northern areas throughout the period.58 The Northeast saw 1980s reruns of the 1936 Jarrow March and its larger, more "political" but consequently less famous communist-led marches of the 1930s.59Unsurprisingly, then, one of Killip's preoccupations was the pernicious effects of unemployment itself. Killip supported the sea coalers in their struggle with the local council, which wanted their camp leveled and would not allow the sea coal to be stored anywhere. If this happened, Killip realized, the "independent" sea coalers would be forced onto the dole.60 Similarly, during his time at the Station, Killip was conscious that "1985 was just after the miners' strike and there was a lot of youth unemployment. Most of the punks at 'The Station' didn't have a job, and this place, run as a very inclusive collective, was so important to them and their self-worth."61 But unemployment is not the same now. Even in the midst of the current severe economic downturn and rampant inflation, there are more job vacancies than workers claiming unemployment benefits. There was a sense in the 1980s that work, of almost any kind, afforded people dignity and was invariably preferable to the dole. Now, thanks to the proliferation of casualized work, "McJobs," zero-hour contracts, and stubborn low pay, m
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