In Flagrante

Product Information

In 1988, Killip published his second and most famous book of photographs, “In Flagrante,” which captured the everyday fallout from deindustrialization and economic decline in northeastern England in the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition serves as the most comprehensive survey of the photographer’s work, with his images from the North East of England at the core. Join artist Chris Killip as he shares his process of making photographs and remembers the people and places of In Flagrante. This is a Tracking technology offered by Facebook and used by other Facebook services such as Facebook Custom Audiences.

And second, he’s always believed that simply recording peoples’ lives has value – so that they’re acknowledged in the here and now, and so that future generations can understand what they did and who they were. Similarly, his images of the seacoal beach – where people scavenged for coal washed up from a nearby power station and mine – show a landscape and a community that have now vanished. We are carrying out this survey to find out more about your experiences of our exhibitions at Baltic.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. 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-industrialisation in a system which regards their lives as disposable. It seems a dry take on images that were once interpreted as deeply political, but Killip doesn’t see it that way.

That decision took him back to the Isle of Man to, as he put it, “purposefully photograph the place I knew and loved”. His lifetime’s work can be viewed as one long continuous exploration of people, place and community – and all three are affected by the human consequences of the decline of industry. In that year alone, the gallery exhibited work by the likes of Graham Smith, Berenice Abbot, Imogen Cunningham, August Sander and Lewis Hine. 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. Whilst marking a moment of de-industrialisation, Killip's stark yet tender observation moves beyond the urgency to record such circumstances, to affirm the value of lives he grew close to – lives that, as he once described 'had history done to them'.If you knew him, he was also warm, funny, and exquisitely aware of his surroundings and the class distinctions that often go unremarked upon in North American society. Christopher David Killip (11 July 1946 – 13 October 2020) was a Manx photographer who worked at Harvard University from 1991 to 2017, as a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies. Sarah Kent in a review said of the Youth on Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1976, ‘This image personifies Thatcher’s Britain’,” he tells me. The fifty photographs of In Flagrante serve as the foundation of this exhibition, which includes maquettes, contact sheets, and work prints to reveal the artist’s process.