Chris Killip: Skinningrove

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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.

The photographs observe the daily rituals and rendezvous of a village seen by outsiders as fiercely self-sufficient and suspicious to newcomers. Made during a period of de-industrialisation in the North East of England where work was scarce, Skinningrove’s access to the coast for fishing provided a tentative lifeline to the community living there. Scenes such as waiting for the tide, cutting lobster pots, or sitting in parked boats are punctuated by the casual daily interactions and relationships between the people of Skinningrove, which are observed intimately by Killip. The book that I have worked on for the past four years is a photographic re-creation of the intersections and divergences of my father’s secret life and the traditional paternal role he played. The project consists of vernacular photographs, new captures and ephemera to tell a story and investigate a childhood mystery. Ironically, several of the archival photos in the project were photographed by me and my father on separate trips to West Berlin in the winter of 1961 but were only rediscovered recently. The Need to Know is the intersection of the factual and fictional based upon historical research, family archives, my memories, and my imagination. 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 later 1960s saw Killip moving towards an intermittent but rewarding freelance career assisting London photographers and working for those arriving in the city for short commissions. An early job was revealing in its fluency: the French photographer Jeanloup Sieff arrived with a small bag containing only a camera, lenses and change of clothes, leaving Killip to buy film just ahead of the shoot. His reputation growing, he agreed terms to assist Justin de Villeneuve, who was responsible for the fashion model Twiggy’s corporate image, as they travelled in a Rolls Royce along the King’s Road. Killip would arrange the studio lighting and process for each shoot, leaving de Villeneuve to do little more than press the shutter. Their aim was to have cover shoots for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Queen magazines within six months, a goal they subsequently achieved. Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you. 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. 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”.

In 1991 Killip was invited to be a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University. In 1994 he was made a tenured professor and was department chair from 1994-98. He retired from Harvard in December 2017 and continued to live in Cambridge, MA, USA, until his death in October, 2020. 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”. The acclaimed documentarian’s last completed book revisits his early-’80s portrait of an English fishing village.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. My father led two lives that rarely intersected. Family members were often the unwitting participants in indecipherable events that left us with many more questions than answers. Mysterious strangers would show up at our apartment late at night only to depart before dawn without saying a word to anyone other than my father. Peculiar encounters, curious radio transmissions, and unexplained coincidences became the norms of my childhood. In this short film directed by Michael Almereyda, Killip presents a group of mostly unpublished photographs from the 1980s, taken in and around the village of Skinningrove, in North Yorkshire, and recalls his relationships with the subjects. Almereyda, who has known Killip since 1991, interviewed the photographer for Aperture magazine in 2012 to discuss a retrospective of his career that had been organized in Essen, Germany. Although four images from the series were included in his groundbreaking In Flagrante (1988), Killip resisted collecting all in a single book for over three decades―he had become so invested in them and respectful of his subjects that he needed time and distance to understand their significance. For a photographer whose work was grounded in the urgent value of documenting “ordinary” peoples’ lives, these nuanced images―radiating a vast stillness of light and time, embedded with the granularity of lives lived―reveal Killip’s conviction that no life is ordinary: everyday lives are sublime. Of all Chris Killip’s bodies of work, the photographs he made between 1982 and 1984 in the village of Skinningrove on the north-east coast of England are perhaps his most intimate and encompassing―of the community he photographed and of himself. “Like a lot of tight-knit fishing communities, it could be hostile to strangers, especially one with a camera,” Killip recalled, “Skinningrove fishermen believed that the sea in front of them was their private territory, theirs alone.”