Chris Killip

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. Killip is known for his black and white images of people and places especially of Tyneside during the 1980s.

From shipbuilding to coal mining, Chris Killip embedded himself in local communities in the 1970s and 80s long enough to capture their solidarity – and decline

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.

Another Country, a joint exhibition with Graham SmithGraham Smith (born 1947) is a photographer from Middlesbrough, England, who was particularly active in photographing Middlesbrough and the north-east of England in the 1970s and 1980s. Smith curtailed his career as a photographer in 1990, since when he has been a professional woodworker. Smith studied at the Middlesbrough College of Art and later the Royal College of Art (London). In the 1970s he was among the photographers central to the Side Gallery, and created a series of photographs that showed working-class people in the north of England that were in a documentary style but were in fact montages. Work from the 1980s would show people within townscapes, and in the words of David Alan Mellor, were "atmospheric, steeped in popular (and personal) memory — dark, romantic places with all the melancholy attributed to Eugène Atget's familiar locations" Another Country, a joint exhibition with Chris Killip held in London in 1985, was generally well reviewed but to some appeared passé in the light of the new "postmodern" work of Martin Parr and others. We wanted to value and document working-class culture’: the photography of Chris Killip and Graham Smith - Guardian held in London in 1985, was generally well reviewed but to some appeared passé in the light of the new “postmodern” work of Martin Parr and others.

His photographs feature in the permanent collections of many major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum Folkwang, Essen; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Chris Killip website.