I was saddened to read last week of the passing of the social documentary photographer Chris Killip. I am not going to write an obituary. I am more than happy to leave that to Sean O’Hagan of The Guardian who has covered it in the two pieces linked below. Rather I have a personal observation or two from the point of view of the work I have been doing on this course.
I think the first picture of his that I ever saw was Youth on a Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1976:
This was probably around the time that In Flagrante was originally published in 1988, just a couple of years after I moved to the North East. At the time the significance of this work was lost on me and it has taken a while since then for his work really to grow on me. For a while I felt it was a bit too much “it’s grim up North” but I have since been helped along by the work of others in the region ploughing a similar furrow: AmberSide collective (which of course Killip helped to establish), Tish Murtha, Markéta Luskačova, to name but a few. I now see the work he did in this region in a different light, and this is the point that is relevant to this course.
I am not going to explore the question any further here for now but I feel there is an argument to be made that Killip fits into that category of photographers that I considered in the essay for Assignment 4, who are able to convey a sense of the local landscape by focusing on the local people. There is certainly a strong sense of portrayal of the social landscape, but taken broadly I do feel that some of the work he did here does paint a picture of the physical landscape, without necessarily addressing it directly.
There is also the “outsider” element. He came from the Isle of Man and lived and worked in the region for only about 15 years, not enough for many locals to regard someone as anything but an outsider (and usually a southerner at that; even after more than 36 years up here in the eyes of some I am still an incomer) and I think this possibly colours the work that he did and the way I now view his work.
Sadly, in the current climate of the Covid pandemic and the growing inequality between North and South, some aspects of life in the region have not changed fundamentally for some sections of society, and there is still a need, indeed a pressing urgency, for work such as that Killip made.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/oct/16/chris-killip-obituary
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 