In Flagrante

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Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, held a major retrospective of Killip’s work in 2012. His photographs are in the permanent collections of museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. 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.

Sarah Kent in a review said of the Youth on Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1976, ‘This image personifies Thatcher’s Britain’,” he tells me. “I wasn’t worried about that, Harold Wilson was Prime Minister when I took that picture. Thatcher had nothing to do with it! Everyone then stared to refer to Thatcher, though there were four prime ministers while I was photographing. Rather than trying to pin all the blame on Mrs Thatcher, I was trying to pin the blame on all politicians, if that was what I was trying to do. And I wasn’t. I was just trying to say that these people are part of history, these [events] are historical facts.” 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. Renowned documentary photographer and former professor of visual and environmental studies Chris Killip died from lung cancer on Oct. 13. He was 74. Killip was a professor of photography in VES (now Art, Film, and Visual Studies) from 1991 to 2017, and the department chair from 1994 to 1998. For more than two decades, he had worked from the basement of the Carpenter Center, sharing his love of the art form with students and colleagues. Simon Being Taken to Sea for the First Time Since His Father Drowned, Skinningrove, North Yorkshire, 1983. Photograph: Chris Killip

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We’re discussing his work in England’sNorth East from 1973-1985, images from which made up his seminal photobook In Flagrante. Released in 1988 and showing communities reeling from the effects of de-industrialisation, it was immediately hailed as a classic – and read as a statement against Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister most identified with the process of de-industrialisation. In fact Killip has long been at pains to reject that reading, pointing out in In Flagrante Two, published in 2016, that he actually shot his images under four Prime Ministers, “Edward Heath, Conservative (1970-1974), Harold Wilson, Labour (1974-1976), James Callaghan, Labour (1976-1979), Margaret Thatcher, Conservative (1979-1990)”.

It’s very disconcerting because it’s like ‘Did this happen?’” he adds. “If you went there you would have no clue that this is where all this happened. But then I have the evidence. It’s kind of fascinating.”Photography and cinema both occupy the lowest level of the Carpenter Center, which is sometimes called the basement level. But Chris and I took to calling it the foundation of the Carpenter Center because it was there that students were taught to make and to learn from images formed from light and shadow; a primary, alchemical art and craft inspired by the actual world with a unique mysterious intimacy and immediacy,” said Haden Guest, director of the Harvard Film Archive and senior lecturer on AFVS. In the following the legal basis for the processing of personal data required by Art. 6 I 1 GDPR is listed.

The introductory photography course VES 40a, which he ran for many years, accommodated 100 students split into 10 sections. Even with so many spots, said Moss, the class often attracted two or three times as many students as it could accommodate. Chris Killip, who has died aged 74 from lung cancer, was one of Britain’s greatest documentary photographers. His most compelling work was made in the north-east of England in the late 1970s and early 80s and was rooted in the relationship of people to the places that made – and often unmade – them as the traditional jobs they relied on disappeared. In 1988 he published In Flagrante, a landmark of social documentary that has influenced generations of younger photographers. His friend and fellow photographer Martin Parr described it as “the best book about Britain since the war”. 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. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.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.

Chris established photography as central to the department’s ecosystem, and the rich dialogue between media that remains central to AFVS,” said Guest. “I like to think of Chris as an anchor and a ballast to the work we do today, a foundation upon which the department stands.” Father and son, West End, Newcastle: ‘Today’s poverty may look different but you hope that someone with as keen an eye as Killip is capturing it.’ Photograph: Chris Killip/Steidl There are several single photographs here that have become iconic in the interim: a melee of a melee of skinheads at a miners’ benefit gig by hardcore punk group Angelic Upstarts; a hunched, crow-like figure in a snowstorm; a thin, dark man carrying a child on his shoulders; a scrawny girl playing with a hula hoop on a forlorn beach. Today’s poverty may look different, less Victorian, but you hope that someone with as keen an eye and as acute an understanding of visual narrative as Chris Killip is capturing it. I somehow doubt it.

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. 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. From the skinhead in 1976’s “Youth on Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside” to the contemplative child in “Simon being taken to sea for the first time since his father drowned” in 1983, Killip imbued his images with a deep sense of empathy and understanding. He gained the trust of his subjects and avoided exploitation in his pursuit of authenticity and beauty. Doing so, he was thrilled to see how accurately he had recorded the time and place – how specific his images were, and therefore how historically valuable. His shots of ship building look like they’re from anothercenturybut they also show the sheer skill of the people involved, he says, in an industry that’s now completely vanished from the region. “Children that have grown up there will have heard about it, but not seen it,” he says. “[But the images show] this is what it was like, these ships were made here, this is how they made them – this place has a history, a big history.” 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.