Chris Killip: The Last Photographer of the Working Class

Abstract

The German industrial city of Essen, in the middle of what used to be the Ruhr iron-and-steel belt, is an oddly appropriate setting for the retrospective exhibition Arbeit/Work (2012) by the Manx-born photographer Chris Killip. (1) fillip photographed in Britain throughout the 1970s and '80s, mostly in the northeast. In 1988, he created t he exhibition and book In Flagrance, which earned him the Cartier-Bresson Prize, and, indirectly, a professorship at Harvard University, where he has been teaching since 1991. (2) Hr has scarcely exhibited in the United Kingdom since 1990. Recently, his newer work has been shown in museums in Germany and France. (3) This reticence over exhibiting Killip's work in the U.K. has something to do with the shill of photography and photographic criticism toward fine art since the late 1980s (Killip's work does not look like fine-art photography), but it has far more to do with his uncompromising stance regarding his subject matter. Working as a photographer's assistant in London in the late 1960s, Killip went back to the Isle of Man for his first book, Isle of Man: A Book About The Manx (1980). (4) He returned to mainland Britain in the mid-1970s, settling in Newcastle just at the moment when the oil and IMF crises, deindustrialization, and redundancy became the defining conditions of life in northern England. Denied permission to photograph in places like the Swan Hunter shipyards, he turned instead to photographing the consequences of the disappearance of work. Killip immersed himself in small working-class communities like like Skinningrove in North Yorkshire, where the closure of an iron and steel plant diectively ended all possibilities of local employment, and, most extraordinary of all, Lynemouth Beach in Northumberland, where in the late 1970s and early '8Os a small community of travellers, ex-miners, and others eked emit a living harvesting sea coal that washed in on the ticks (the result of a local mine dumping its mixed rock-coal waste directly into the sea). Immersion in these communities reinforced Killip's attitudes toward what he was experiencing. The opening lines of the epigraph to In Flagrante capture this exactly: '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-industrialization in a system which regards their lives as disposable. (5) It is not surprising that In Flagrante was read as a savage critique of Thatcherism. A book on the working class, covering fifteen years of industrial decline, it contains not a single picture Of wage work. In fact, its cogent lucidity, acclaimed in the critical rhetoric of the time, was clue in no small part. to Killip's gradual immersion in his subject matter. He was based in Newcastle starting in 1976, photographing at Skinningrove for several years and living for fourteen months in 1983-84 on and off in a caravan at Lynemouth Beach. He also photographed the Pirelli factory workthree at Burton upon Trent in 1989 and spent months on the shop floor. In immersing himself in these communities, he built relationships with those he photographed that were much closer than reportage, or even documentation, normally allows. This immersion largely determines the nature of his photographic contribution. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In a sense all photography is observed life. What varies is the degree of observation and the kind of approach to subjects the physical, psychOlogical, and political distance that artists take. Killip has a sharp take on this. The second half of the epigraph to In Flagrante reads, 'lb the people in these photographs I am superfluous, my life does not depend on their struggle, only my hopes. This is a subjective book about my time in England. I take what isn't mine and I covet other people's lives. (7) This unusual admission of implication in the lives of the subjects of his photography brings to mind Gyorgy Lukacs's comment on the ethics of the essay writer: that bound to one's subject matter, the work of the essayist must be to discover means of expression adequate to their truth. …