Any new book of Chris Killip’s images faces a challenge: how to justify its existence and set itself apart from Thames & Hudson’s superb retrospective of the late photographer’s work, published in 2022. It’s a challenge of which Mark Holborn, editor of Chris Killip: North, is acutely aware. In his introduction, he rightly praises Ken Grant and Tracy Marshall-Grant’s “ambitious” predecessor for the way in which it offers a “systemic record and context”.
Holborn may have been forced to take a different tack, but it’s a disappointment that the introduction is the only framing essay here, especially as it dwells on the editor’s personal working relationship with Killip. The decision to feature images taken in Ireland and Killip’s native Isle Of Man as a form of prologue and epilogue is also curious. Holborn’s justification doesn’t really hold up, and the geographical incongruity and tonal discord are distracting, given that all of the images are presented in one unbroken sequence.
Where Holborn has succeeded, however, is in doing a deeper dive into some of Killip’s most celebrated series and focusing on putting unpublished images into the public domain. Collaborating with the Chris Killip Trust gave him unfettered access to the archives, which must guarantee treasure.
The choice of title automatically sets up comparisons to John Bulmer’s The North. However, while Bulmer’s colour pictures – originally commissioned for a Sunday Times Magazine article in 1965 – may now act as prompts for nostalgic reflection, Killip’s images present a starker black-and-white view of industrial decline and urban degradation.
The first featured photo taken in the North depicts the tanker Kyra Lynn afloat in the Tyne in 1975, a clutch of men on the riverbank watching on in the knowledge that Newcastle’s industrial heritage is a ship that has now sailed. Everywhere you look, there are unmistakeable visual metaphors. The vertiginous black hulls of Tyne Pride and Everett F. Wells overshadowing terraced streets; shipyard workers trudging past derelict houses that in the older images are still homes; a Consett playground fenced like a prison yard; broken windows on Huddersfield’s Prospect Street. These are portraits of a world that is crumbling, and of the people left to live amid the rubble and detritus.
The mood of the young men in the pictures from the North Yorkshire fishing village of Skinningrove seems to be one of boredom and wearied resignation. They sit staring out at the sea, waiting for the tide to change but with the gnawing understanding that circumstances have left them high and dry.
Most powerful, however, are the images of those eking out a meagre existence by collecting seacoal on the shoreline near Lynemouth Colliery. The polished nuggets of black gold and the turbulent froth-capped waves of the North Sea naturally lend themselves to Killip’s chosen medium. Having gained access to this notoriously closed community through his friend and fellow photographer Mik Critchlow, Killip immersed himself in their world, occupying a caravan on site for months so as to be able to capture these lives lived literally on the margins. The seacoalers embodied the Thatcherite neoliberal mantras of the time – enterprise, self-motivation, hard work and entrepreneurial spirit – and yet found themselves not thriving but barely surviving.
Killip once commented: “History is most often written from a distance, and rarely from the point of view of those who endured it.” Neither is true of the history documented so richly in this book.
Chris Killip: North, Mark Holborn [ed.] (Thames & Hudson)
Price: £75. Info: here
words BEN WOOLHEAD
