Seacoal

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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

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.” 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." 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. Gordon in the water, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth, 1983. Credit: Chris Killip Photography Trust/Martin Parr FoundationIn the following the legal basis for the processing of personal data required by Art. 6 I 1 GDPR is listed.

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.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. Life story interview with Chris Killip by Mark Haworth-Booth, 1997, Oral History of British Photography, National Sound Archive, British Library (accessible for UK Higher Education and Further Education institutions only) 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”. 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.

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.

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 Elsewhere is his work made in the North Yorkshire fishing village of Skinningrove, “a place which was willfully kept by the people who lived there unkempt”, says Grant, describing how people fished and worked in the local iron smelter. “Several of the people he photographed, they died because of drowning, and Chris was very much part of the aftermath of that situation, making pictures of the families.” Family on a Sunday walk, Skinningrove, 1982 Bever, Skinningrove, North Yorkshire, 1983

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

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. Because Chris knew he was dying, and because he was leaving a lot of the work in the [Martin] Parr Foundation as his archive, he did what I’ve been regarding as his first selection of the retrospective,” says Marshall-Grant. The works on display have been curated from that first ‘edit’ by Killip, and, aside from the oversized pieces in the show, the prints were all made by him in the last decade of his life. “So it’s been quite good because we can already feel quite close to what he wanted,” she adds. 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. 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