Chris Killip

Killip was born in Douglas, Isle of Man; his parents ran the Highlander pub.[1] He left school at 16 to work as a trainee hotel manager, while also working as a beach photographer.[4] In 1964, aged 18, he moved to London where he worked as an assistant to the advertising photographer Adrian Flowers.[4] He soon went freelance, along with periods working in his father's pub on the Isle of Man.[4] In 1969, Killip ended his commercial work to concentrate on his own photography. The work from this time was eventually published by the Arts Council as Isle of Man: A Book about the Manx in 1980 with a text by John Berger. In 1972, he was commissioned by the Arts Council to photograph Bury St Edmunds and Huddersfield,[4] and in 1975 he won a two-year fellowship from Northern Arts to photograph the northeast of England.[2] He moved to Newcastle-upon-Tyne to pursue this work,[4] which Creative Camera devoted its entire May 1977 issue to.[2]

In 1977, Killip became a co-founder,[5] exhibition curator, and advisor at the Side Gallery, Newcastle, and worked as its first director[4] for 18 months. He produced a body of work from his photographs in the northeast of England, published in 1988 as In Flagrante[4] with a text by Berger and Sylvia Grant. These black and white images, "portraits of Tyneside's working class communities amongst the signifiers of the region's declining industrial landscape",[4] mostly made on 4×5 film, are now recognised as among the most important visual records of living in 1980s Britain.[2] Gerry Badger describes the photographs as "taken from a point of view that opposed everything [Thatcher] stood for", and the book as "about community", "a dark, pessimistic journey".[6]

The book In Flagrante was well received on its publication in 1988, but Killip's kind of black and white documentation of the underclass was going out of fashion quickly in Britain, as photographers used colour to show consumerism and for consciously and explicitly artistic purposes.[7] In Flagrante was reproduced in February 2009 within one of Errata Editions' "Books on Books". In a review of this reproduction, Robert Ayers describes the original as "one of the greatest photography books ever published".[8]

In 1988, Killip was commissioned by Pirelli UK to photograph its tyre factory in Burton; agreement on this was reached in April the next year, whereupon Killip started work. Attempting to use available light in a darkened factory in which work was done on a black product, he was at first unsuccessful, but in June he switched to flash and a large-format camera and photographed for three more months. The resulting work was exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) in September 1989; it was published in book form by Ute Eskildsen/Steidl in 2007.[9]

From 1992 until 2004, Killip photographed pilgrimages and other scenes in rural Ireland; the result was published in 2009 by Thames & Hudson as Here Comes Everybody.[10]

In 1991, he moved to the USA, having been given a post at Harvard University as a visiting lecturer.[4] He was made a tenured professor in 1994, and remained as a professor of visual and environmental studies until 2017.[4][5]

Arbeit/Work was published by Steidl in 2012 to accompany Killip's retrospective exhibition at Museum Folkwang, Essen.

Killip had a son, Matthew, with the photographer Markéta Luskačová.[11][12][13]

After his appointment to a post at Harvard, Killip lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the rest of his life, in 2000 marrying Mary Halpenny, who also worked at Harvard.[1]

Killip died on 13 October 2020 from lung cancer.[1] He was 74.[5]

• 1989: Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, from the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, Paris for In Flagrante[26]
• 2013: Shortlisted, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, for his exhibition What Happened – Great Britain 1970–1990 at Le Bal in Paris.[27]
• 2020: Dr. Erich Salomon Award from the German Society for Photography, Cologne.[28][29]

Killip's work is held in the following permanent collections:

• Government Art Collection, UK: 3 prints (as of October 2020)[30]
• Museum of Modern Art, New York: 20 prints (as of October 2020)[31]
• National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia: 12 prints (as of October 2020)[32]
• Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam: 4 prints (as of October 2020)[33]
• Tate, UK: 80 prints (as of October 2020)[34]
• Victoria and Albert Museum, London: 93 prints (as of October 2020), including the 69 prints used for Isle of Man.[15][35]

• Official website
• "Sprouts, skinheads, Sundays and supermarkets: Chris Killip – in pictures" at The Guardian
• Portraits of Chris Killip at the National Portrait Gallery, London