Chris Killip, professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, speaks about his career as a photographer with filmmaker Michael Almereyda. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Poetic, penetrating, and often heartbreaking, Chris Killip's In Flagrante remains the most important photobook to document the devastating impact of deindustrialization on working-class communities in northern England in the 1970s and 1980s. From the skinhead in 1976’s “Youth on Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside” to the contemplative child in “Simon being taken to sea for the first time since his father drowned” in 1983, Killip imbued his images with a deep sense of empathy and understanding. He gained the trust of his subjects and avoided exploitation in his pursuit of authenticity and beauty. Our friendly and knowledgeable Baltic Crew team can interpret the artworks and help bring meaning and understanding to the exhibition.

Amanda Maddox, assistant curator, the J. Paul Getty Museum, leads a combined gallery tour of the exhibitions Thomas Annan: Photographer of Glasgow and Now Then: Chris Killip and the Making of In Flagrante. Meet under the stairs in the Entrance Hall. Sign-up begins at 1:30 p.m. at the Information Desk. Capacity limited.

1946–2020

Photography and cinema both occupy the lowest level of the Carpenter Center, which is sometimes called the basement level. But Chris and I took to calling it the foundation of the Carpenter Center because it was there that students were taught to make and to learn from images formed from light and shadow; a primary, alchemical art and craft inspired by the actual world with a unique mysterious intimacy and immediacy,” said Haden Guest, director of the Harvard Film Archive and senior lecturer on AFVS. Chris leaves quite a legacy of his documentary photography, which is known internationally, but also he has a legacy of students who were devoted to him and discovered photography through their studies with him,” added Harper.

Join photographer Chris Killip, whose work is featured in the exhibition, as he discusses the creation of his groundbreaking photobook In Flagrante (1988) and the decision to republish it decades later. Sign up begins at noon at the Information Desk. 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.

There are several single photographs here that have become iconic in the interim: a melee of a melee of skinheads at a miners’ benefit gig by hardcore punk group Angelic Upstarts; a hunched, crow-like figure in a snowstorm; a thin, dark man carrying a child on his shoulders; a scrawny girl playing with a hula hoop on a forlorn beach. Today’s poverty may look different, less Victorian, but you hope that someone with as keen an eye and as acute an understanding of visual narrative as Chris Killip is capturing it. I somehow doubt it. Sarah Kent in a review said of the Youth on Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1976, ‘This image personifies Thatcher’s Britain’,” he tells me. “I wasn’t worried about that, Harold Wilson was Prime Minister when I took that picture. Thatcher had nothing to do with it! Everyone then stared to refer to Thatcher, though there were four prime ministers while I was photographing. Rather than trying to pin all the blame on Mrs Thatcher, I was trying to pin the blame on all politicians, if that was what I was trying to do. And I wasn’t. I was just trying to say that these people are part of history, these [events] are historical facts.” He is survived by Mary, his son, Matthew, from a previous relationship with the Czech photographer Markéta Luskačová, his stepson, Joshua, two granddaughters, Millie and Celia, and a brother, Dermott.

In the following the legal basis for the processing of personal data required by Art. 6 I 1 GDPR is listed. We’re discussing his work in England’sNorth East from 1973-1985, images from which made up his seminal photobook In Flagrante. Released in 1988 and showing communities reeling from the effects of de-industrialisation, it was immediately hailed as a classic – and read as a statement against Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister most identified with the process of de-industrialisation. In fact Killip has long been at pains to reject that reading, pointing out in In Flagrante Two, published in 2016, that he actually shot his images under four Prime Ministers, “Edward Heath, Conservative (1970-1974), Harold Wilson, Labour (1974-1976), James Callaghan, Labour (1976-1979), Margaret Thatcher, Conservative (1979-1990)”. Chris established photography as central to the department’s ecosystem, and the rich dialogue between media that remains central to AFVS,” said Guest. “I like to think of Chris as an anchor and a ballast to the work we do today, a foundation upon which the department stands.” His books of photography included four large-format zines published in 2018: “Portraits,” “The Station,” “Skinningrove,” and “The Last Ships.”

Exhibition Accessibility

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. Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, held a major retrospective of Killip’s work in 2012. His photographs are in the permanent collections of museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Doing so, he was thrilled to see how accurately he had recorded the time and place – how specific his images were, and therefore how historically valuable. His shots of ship building look like they’re from anothercenturybut they also show the sheer skill of the people involved, he says, in an industry that’s now completely vanished from the region. “Children that have grown up there will have heard about it, but not seen it,” he says. “[But the images show] this is what it was like, these ships were made here, this is how they made them – this place has a history, a big history.”