Chris Killip: 1946-2020

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To know this is to find inevitable heartbreak in Killip’s subtle appreciation for the hardworking lads who have few options beyond fishing, drinking, and otherwise hanging out, waiting for something exciting to happen, in a time and place when there was no likelihood of escape. Chris Killip ‘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 de-industrialisation in a system which regards their lives as disposable.

Chris 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. A career retrospective of the late Chris Killip documenting the economic shifts in the North of England in the 1970s and 1980s and the lives of those who in his words 'had history done to them'.The Tate Photography Series is a celebration of photography by artists in the Tate collection, presenting the work of some of the most significant photographers in the world today.

As the son of English pub owners, Killip grew up in economic circumstances entirely lacking in artifice or pretension. Chris KILLIP was one of the most influential photographers and teachers to emerge from the United Kingdom. A highly anticipated retrospective of the life and work of Chris Killip, one of the leading and most influential photographers to emerge from the United Kingdom over the last century.

Registered office: WSM Services Limited, Connect House, 133-137 Alexandra Road, Wimbledon, LONDON SW19 7JY. He is best known for his black and white images of people and places, especially in the North East of England in the 1970s and 1980s.

Chris Killip (1946-2020) was one of the most important photographers of the 1970s and 80s, capturing the lives and experiences of the more regionalised communities around the UK. Some photobooks, some bodies of work, are so impressive that it is intimidating to put into words a measure of their value. A 39-year-old with cropped white hair, always wearing a suit, with pockets stitched inside the jacket to hold my slides.It includes a foreword by Brett Rogers, in-depth texts by Ken Grant tracing Killip’s life and career, and essays by Gregory Halpern, Amanda Maddox and Lynsey Hanley. Erschien ein Jahr nach und in einer sehr viel kleineren Auflage (von nur 1000 Exemplaren) als die englische Original-Ausgabe (Martin Secker und Warburg, London, 1988). Killip was a familiar sight at the underground punk clubs here in Gateshead in the 80s and captured the visceral nature of the gigs as only someone can when they're in the thick of it with a camera.

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. One could view two of Killip’s images, made only a couple of years apart, depicting a neighborhood street and the adjacent shipyard where it’s inhabitants once labored, to understand the value of Killip’s talent and the historical significance of his bothering to look, his willingness to see. It is touching to know that Killip was able to assist in the editing of his final publication before succumbing to an illness in the fall of 2020, and that his longtime printer Steidl was brought on board to help produce this beautiful photobook.He retired from Harvard in December 2017 and continued to live in Cambridge, MA, USA, until his death in October, 2020. Tis a pity that this definitive overview of Killip’s 40+ year career, as a photographer and subsequently as a professor at Harvard University, by the very limits of a one volume publication, cannot include the full bodies of his various projects. killip tells his personal tale through these pictures, but he also allows his subjects` collective story a clear voice of its own. Living, on and off, in a caravan on Lynemouth’s Seacoal camp from 1982 to 1984, Killip immersed himself in their struggles to survive. The tactile pleasure of this hardbound book, with its lush paper and sublime tonal printing, nearly overwhelms the content of Killip’s images depicting the landscape and people of working-class England and Ireland during the Thatcher era of the 1970’s and 80’s.