Chris Killip: 1946-2020

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It may inspire you to become a punk or a laborer, a photographer of your own surroundings, or perhaps a revolutionary. This book, 'The Station' by Chris KILLIP, documents an inclusive collective that offered refuge to young people threatened by unemployment in April 1985, shortly after the miners' strike. 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. 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. 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.

If you are familiar with Killip’s dynamic and sincerely observed medium and large format black and white film imagery, you will appreciate the importance of this publication.Wonderful enlarged version of the famous photobook classic from 1988: Martin Parr, The Photobook vol 2, page 299. If you care about the off shoring of manufacturing jobs (and in this instance how that impacted the United Kingdom in the 1970s and 80s) you must seek out Killip’s gorgeous rendering of a tragedy that repeats to this day.

The title, "In Flagrante," suggests a sense of capturing these communities and individuals in the midst of their struggles. The career retrospective of the late great photographer, aptly titled Chris Killip , 1946-2020 is a gorgeous new photobook published by Thames and Hudson. Announcing the definitive, full-career retrospective of the life and work of Chris Killip (1946-2020), one of the UK’s most important and influential post-war documentary photographers.Living, on and off, in a caravan on Lynemouth’s Seacoal camp from 1982 to 1984, Killip immersed himself in their struggles to survive. Tracy Marshall-Grant is director of development at the Royal Photographic Society and producer at Northern Narratives. Some photobooks, some bodies of work, are so impressive that it is intimidating to put into words a measure of their value. The Station was not merely a music and rehearsal space, but a crucible for the self-expression of the sub-cultures and punk politics of the time. 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.