JTF (just the facts): Published in 2024 by Stanley/Barker (here). Cloth hardcover, foil stamped, with tipped in cover photograph, 30 x 22 cm, 104 pages, with 52 monochrome reproductions. With texts by the artist, and Niall Sweeney & Nigel Truswell. Designed by Niall Sweeney & Nigel Truswell. (Cover and spread shots below.)
Comments/Context: It might seem odd to describe Chris Killip as under appreciated. After all, he was a beloved figure in his native Great Britain, where he earned numerous awards, commissions, and grants over a photo career which spanned a half-century. His prints are held by most major museums and many private collectors. And at least one of his publications, In Flagrante (reviewed in exhibition form here), is widely esteemed as a landmark monograph.
All of that may be true. But in the United States his star has never ascended to quite the same heights as in Europe. This despite the fact that he lived and worked in America for the last forty years of his life, from his 1991 decampment to Harvard, to his retirement from teaching in 2017, to his death a few years later in the other Cambridge (Massachusetts).
If Killip’s achievements flew under the American radar, it might be because none of his work was based in the U.S. Even as he settled happily into American middle age and dotage, his photographic focus never veered from the UK, in particular its northerly working classes. He thought of himself as “a chronicler of [Great Britain’s] deindustrialisation revolution”, even if that mission meant bypassing his adopted country.
A chronology of Killip’s British interests can be loosely traced through his monographs. His debut book Isle of Man, published in 1980, documented his forays to the titular island where he was born in 1946. In Flagrante came next in 1988, establishing him in the UK photo canon with a brilliant series shot between 1973 and 1985 in Northern England.
If Killip’s books had tracked his work, the next title would likely have focused on Skinningrove. This was a small Yorkshire village on England’s northeast coast which had garnered his attention between 1982 and 1984. Killip made several extended visits, gradually gaining acceptance and probing its inner workings. Four photos from the town appeared in In Flagrante, and a full monograph seemed in order. But Killip did not feel settled with the photos. “They needed more time, more distance,” according to Niall Sweeny and Nigel Truswell, “before even he himself could understand what significance they might contain.” Thus no Skinningrove book materialized. Instead Killip moved on to the Pirelli Factory, followed by a steady stream of other projects.
It wasn’t until 2018 that Skinningrove finally stirred toward publication. A broad selection was published in zine form that year (among a full set of four tabloids reviewed here), followed by an exhibition at Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston. These were initial stabs toward a monograph, but the efforts were tentative. Killip used the zine as a trial balloon, anonymously posting a copy to every resident in the village. When that effort seemed to go over without a hitch, he embarked in earnest on a book. He completed the general framework of Skinningrove before passing in October of 2020.
After some fits and starts—pausing first for the global pandemic and then a sweeping Killip career retrospective exhibition/book in 2022—Skinningrove has finally been published as a hardback by Stanley/Barker. It took forty years to manifest, but the wait was worthwhile. The production is handsome and refined, with richly toned monochromes arranged into a landscape-format book which opens easily. Its pace feels assured and unhurried, with one photo per spread on the right hand pages. They’re accompanied by facing captions, and also two brief essays offering historical context.
These texts are informative, but it’s the photographs which do Skinningrove’s heavy lifting. They are consistently superb, with interlocking forms and split second compositions belying their large format origin. Killip favored a handheld 4 x 5 press camera. Every exposure required substantial time for sheet preparation, exposure, and reloading. It’s a marvel that he could finagle such a machine with dexterity to capture “Crabs, People, Dogs” (the cover shot) or “Whippet and his two dogs.” But somehow he managed.
Killip was an excellent technician and visual artist. But what pushed him into rarified air was the ability to pursue a journalistic mission at the same time. Look past the astonishing skill of Skinningrove’s individual frames, and this book is a case study of documentary exposé. Using just fifty odd photos, it weaves a rich story of place and people. Almost as an aside, Killip’s pictures comment on the shifting fates of post-industrialization, Thatcherism, and manual labor.
As Killip first encountered it in 1982, Skinningrove was an tight-knit community on the North-East coast of England. The economic base had been iron mining until the 1970s. With that industry in decline, locals had patchworked other pursuits including a small fishing fleet. The town was hidden from the main road and resistant to outsiders. For the Manx-born Killip, raised on an insular island, he must have felt some natural fellowship, and a determination to pluck its provincial bubble. The very first photo draws open Skinningrove’s curtain for all to see, with an overview of the harbor setting the town stage. The next picture zooms in slightly to show a family on a Sunday shoreline walk. In the background we pick up small details about the local housing, vegetation, and geography. More will be added in short order.
The next pages introduce the small cast of townies which activate most of the book’s photos. They were young men with colorful nicknames, including Blackie (Terrance Whitney), Bever (Trevor McConnell), Toothie (Steve Tooth), and Whippet (Malcolm Whitney). Friends from birth, this was a generation waiting in the wings, but their vocational prospects were uncertain. In the lead role was the charismatic Leso (Leslie Holiday), a magnetic figure who helped adopt Killip into the community and aided his photographic access. Leso appears in several photographs, holding court or otherwise galvanizing frames.
Circling around him the town’s twenty-somethings were often engaged in fishing preparation or equipment maintenance. But sea harvests were erratic, and the crew seemed to have plenty of downtime. Killip captured idle dogs, prams, and boats strewn alongside the town’s residents. All were irresistible targets for a visiting photographer, or for England’s growing punk subculture (as revealed in photos of Whippet, boasting a mohawk and his latest vinyl purchase). Contemporaneous photographers were similarly drawn to the national malaise, including Peter Mitchell, Daniel Meadows, Homer Sykes, and Graham Smith. But Killip’s approach of embedded reportage, combined with elite camera skills, set him apart.
Almost all the photos in the book feature people. A handful can be classified as traditional portraits, with subjects standing calmly before Killip’s lens. “I wanted to record people’s lives because I valued them,” he wrote. “I wanted them to be remembered. If you take a photograph of someone they are immortalized, they’re there forever. For me that was important.” Young Brian Magor is shown aging quickly across 3 pages. Other photos document Killip’s adventures on boats and walking roadsides. Wherever he ventured, he had a keen nose for photogenic characters.
Important as they may be, Killip’s posed portraits are the exceptions in a book comprised mostly of fleeting candids. Not only do humans spew clues, but we can infer something about local customs, posture, clothing, cigarettes, hair styles, and language. He described his approach as “acknowledging people’s lives, and also contextualizing people’s lives.” Backdrops in the book coalesce into a physical portrait of Skinningrove, a grimy place of concrete berms and scant vegetation. Its residents were engaged in a pitched battle against not only the elements, but also global economic forces (a duality explored more recently by Andrea Gjestvang’s Atlantic Cowboy, reviewed here).
This was Skinningrove as it looked during Killip’s last visit in 1984. Shortly after he left, several locals perished on fishing trips, including Leso. When he next returned thirty years later he was “shocked by how it had changed.” Only one fishing boat remained, and “the place seemed like a pale reflection of itself.”
It’s likely that this blunt evidence of seismic changes kickstarted the recent Skinningrove zine and book. Decades had passed since he’d last made photos there. He’d finally achieved enough distance from the project to attack it objectively. “When you are photographing,” he wrote, “you are caught up in the moment, trying to deal as best you can with what’s in front of you. At that moment you’re not thinking that a photograph is also, and inevitably, a death foretold.”
Killip himself has passed now, along with many of the people he photographed. The posthumous Skinningrove monograph provides a belated chance to assess this intimate series. For Americans, it might also be an opportunity to revisit his other considerable achievements.
Collector’s POV: Chris Killip is represented by Augusta Edwards Fine Art in London (here). Killip’s work has only an intermittent history in the secondary markets in recent years, mostly in London-based sales. Recent prices have ranged between roughly $1000 and $15000.
