Seacoal

Product Information

Aged 74, Chris died peacefully at home in Cambridge, Mass., his wife Mary and son Matt at his bedside. Thank you, Chris, for everything. Further reading Chris Killip, born on the Isle of Man in 1946, is a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University where he has taught since 1991. Chris Killip photographed in the north of England during the 1970s and 80s, when the country’s three main heavy industries—steelworks, shipyards, and coal mines—went into decline. Killip calls the resulting book, In Flagrante, a “portrait of working class struggles at that time.” 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.

Fourteen of the images taken in the Seacoal camp were included in the seminal book In Flagrante, and in 2011 a book dedicated to the series was published by Steidl entitled Seacoal, which was later reissued again in 2015. 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. Living, on and off, in a caravan on Lynemouth’s Seacoal camp from 1982 to 1984, Killip immersed himself in their struggles to survive. Fourteen images from the Seacoal series were also included in Killip’s groundbreaking book In Flagrante (1988). 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. Later, I wanted to get away from this very formal thing and changed my photography, and so I used a plate camera where you had a cape. I had a thumb press, so I’d be looking at you, but you never knew when I was going to take the picture. Between 1982 to 1984, Killip lived on and off in a caravan at the seacoal camp in Lynemouth – becoming an embedded part of the community, Killip observed the daily struggles to work and survive in this inhospitable environment. As well as the scenes of hard working conditions, images of tenderness in the relationships between the residents show kindness and camaraderie in times of uncertainty as the region underwent rapid de-industrialisation.

NEWSLETTER

When you look at the work in a small sample, you see work which is full of the austerity of the time in which it was photographed,” Grant explains. Industries that had once provided stability were eroding, “and you see a certain pulling of the rug from under communities which I think people recognise and feel for”. 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. The people I like very much and I’m very close to, sometimes I don’t get a picture that I think does them justice because I know so much about them Clive Dilnot, ‘Chris Killip: The Last Photographer of the Working Class’, afterimage, vol.39, May–June 2012.

I worry about the digital camera. I tell my students to turn off the screen, and they don’t. They think I’m crazy. I’m not crazy. I know what made my pictures better was the anxiety I had, because I didn’t know what I’d just taken. I couldn’t see it, and I always thought it wasn’t good enough, so I’d push a bit harder. I’d try to make a better picture.Chris Killip: My camera’s very visible. It’s big. And there’s something good about this, where you have to deal with the fact that I am a photographer and I am here. Look at this great big contraption. 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.

The exhibition begins with Killip’s work in the Isle of Man, where he was from, followed by his photographs made in the north of England in the early 1970s. In these images, Grant says, “you get a sense of someone who’s really excited about discovering photography and what photography could do, but also excited about moving through the north of England and figuring out what was taking place there”. Gordon in the water, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth,1983 Helen and her hula hoop, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, Northumbria, 1984 Mr Killip later met a Seacoaler who remembered him at Appleby Horse Fair and he re-introduced the photographer to the community. He moved into a caravan and began documenting their lives. Chris Killip’s work is impassioned, urgent – but it is rarely tragic, despite the circumstances faced by many of the people he photographed, and remained close to, over the course of his life. There are images that will evoke tragedy in some audiences, but then, for Killip, it was never about audiences. In 1991 I was telephoned out of the blue by Alfred Guzzetti, chair of Harvard’s Visual and Environmental Studies Department. The faculty wanted to appoint Chris as professor of photography but were worried: he seemed ‘difficult’. I agreed but said that, however difficult Chris could be, I’d always found it worth persevering. How clever of Harvard to appoint him. Chris worked there from 1991 until his retirement in 2017. He was a natural, giving his students time, attention and brilliant ways into the core of the medium – for example, by comparing the photographs of Mexico by, on the one hand Paul Strand (Communist but ‘patronising’) and on the other, Manuel Alvarez Bravo (local and ‘accepting complexity’). He brought David Goldblatt to Harvard to work on his exhibition and book Structures of Dominion and Democracy. Chris found teaching – and the administration that goes with it – so all-consuming that his serious photography came to an end. However, he’d worked so intensely from 1969 onwards that he was understandably burned out creatively by 1988. 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”.My caravan was like a café and it [had] nice light because the windows were on both sides. It was a good place to photograph.” —Chris Killip You’re going to get a picture by being there. It’s never easy. Sometimes you’re good and they’re good…I’d never seen them before and I never saw them again.” —Chris Killip It took him a long time to get in with the Seacolers. They had no idea who he was and he faced violence the first time he tried to photograph them," he told ITV Tyne Tees. Chris Killip began photographing the people of Lynemouth seacoal beach in the north east of England in 1982, after nearly seven years of failed efforts to obtain their consent. During 1983 to 1984 he lived in a caravan on the seacoal camp and documented the life, work and the struggle to survive on the beach, using his unflinching style of objective documentation. Fifty of the one hundred and twenty four images published here, were first shown in 1984 at the Side Gallery in Newcastle and others were an important element of Killip’s ground-breaking and legendary book In Flagrante, published four years later. In Flagrante means ‘caught in the act,’ and that’s what my pictures are. You can see me in the shadow, but I’m trying to undermine your confidence in what you’re seeing, to remind people that photographs are a construction, a fabrication. They were made by somebody. They are not to be trusted. It’s as simple as that.” —Chris Killip

Chris Killip is widely regarded as one of the most influential British photographers of his generation. Born in the Isle of Man in 1946, he began his career as a commercial photographer before turning to his own work in the late 1960s. His book, In Flagrante, a collection of photographs made in the North East of England during the 1970s and early 1980s, is now recognized as a landmark work of documentary photography. Other bodies of work include the series Isle of Man, Seacoal, Skinningrove and Pirelli. The images here are included in an exhibition at the Getty Museum, Now Then: Chris Killip and the Making of In Flagrante (May 23–August 13, 2017). Industry, its decline and the transition between the two were recurring themes in his work, but through his humanistic lens, those subjects were always second to the people most impacted by them. Youth on wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1975 Gordon in the water, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth, 1983. Credit: Chris Killip Photography Trust/Martin Parr Foundation

Exhibition Accessibility

The Photographers’ Gallery in London is staging a retrospective of his work overseen by photographer Ken Grant and curator Tracy Marshall-Grant, which they hope will bring more context to the man behind the images. It is the first exhibition on Killip since he died from cancer in 2020. Killip had spoken about the idea of a retrospective, but it was “only when he started to become ill that the conversations really accelerated”, Grant says. They are full of admiration for the work and admiration for the pictures in the way they capture people. I think when we go to the Baltic it will be much more about the people and how they recognise themselves." 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. Then comes three major series, including Killip’s Seacoal project. It was made between 1982 and 1984 in Lynemouth, Northumberland, where coal thrown out to sea from the nearby mine would sometimes wash up again on the shore. People would then often gather it for fuel or selling on. Though Killip photographed the area “intensely”, there remained some distance, Grant explains, but he ended up getting a caravan and living on the beach with the seacoal workers. They became close friends, and Grant says that he was still in touch with them at the end of his life.