My caravan was like a café and it [had] nice light because the windows were on both sides. It was a good place to photograph.” —Chris Killip

Then comes three major series, including Killip’s Seacoal project. It was made between 1982 and 1984 in Lynemouth, Northumberland, where coal thrown out to sea from the nearby mine would sometimes wash up again on the shore. People would then often gather it for fuel or selling on. Though Killip photographed the area “intensely”, there remained some distance, Grant explains, but he ended up getting a caravan and living on the beach with the seacoal workers. They became close friends, and Grant says that he was still in touch with them at the end of his life.Killip first attempted to photograph Seacoal Beach in Lynemouth, Northumberland, England, in 1976, but it took him six years to gain the trust of the people who worked there. Living, on and off, in a caravan on Lynemouth’s Seacoal camp from 1982 to 1984, Killip immersed himself in their struggles to survive. Fourteen images from the Seacoal series were also included in Killip’s groundbreaking book In Flagrante (1988).

Life story interview with Chris Killip by Mark Haworth-Booth, 1997, Oral History of British Photography, National Sound Archive, British Library (accessible for UK Higher Education and Further Education institutions only) In Flagrante means ‘caught in the act,’ and that’s what my pictures are. You can see me in the shadow, but I’m trying to undermine your confidence in what you’re seeing, to remind people that photographs are a construction, a fabrication. They were made by somebody. They are not to be trusted. It’s as simple as that.” —Chris Killip Mr Killip later met a Seacoaler who remembered him at Appleby Horse Fair and he re-introduced the photographer to the community. He moved into a caravan and began documenting their lives.

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Industry, its decline and the transition between the two were recurring themes in his work, but through his humanistic lens, those subjects were always second to the people most impacted by them. Youth on wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1975 Between 1982 to 1984, Killip lived on and off in a caravan at the seacoal camp in Lynemouth – becoming an embedded part of the community, Killip observed the daily struggles to work and survive in this inhospitable environment. As well as the scenes of hard working conditions, images of tenderness in the relationships between the residents show kindness and camaraderie in times of uncertainty as the region underwent rapid de-industrialisation. 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.

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. In 1991 I was telephoned out of the blue by Alfred Guzzetti, chair of Harvard’s Visual and Environmental Studies Department. The faculty wanted to appoint Chris as professor of photography but were worried: he seemed ‘difficult’. I agreed but said that, however difficult Chris could be, I’d always found it worth persevering. How clever of Harvard to appoint him. Chris worked there from 1991 until his retirement in 2017. He was a natural, giving his students time, attention and brilliant ways into the core of the medium – for example, by comparing the photographs of Mexico by, on the one hand Paul Strand (Communist but ‘patronising’) and on the other, Manuel Alvarez Bravo (local and ‘accepting complexity’). He brought David Goldblatt to Harvard to work on his exhibition and book Structures of Dominion and Democracy. Chris found teaching – and the administration that goes with it – so all-consuming that his serious photography came to an end. However, he’d worked so intensely from 1969 onwards that he was understandably burned out creatively by 1988. Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.The exhibition begins with Killip’s work in the Isle of Man, where he was from, followed by his photographs made in the north of England in the early 1970s. In these images, Grant says, “you get a sense of someone who’s really excited about discovering photography and what photography could do, but also excited about moving through the north of England and figuring out what was taking place there”. Gordon in the water, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth,1983 Helen and her hula hoop, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, Northumbria, 1984 Gordon in the water, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth, 1983. Credit: Chris Killip Photography Trust/Martin Parr Foundation I am the photographer of the de-industrial revolution in England. I didn’t set out to be this. It’s what happened during the time I was photographing.” —Chris Killip In the following the legal basis for the processing of personal data required by Art. 6 I 1 GDPR is listed. By the early 80s, Killip’s portraits were regularly being featured on the cover of the London Review of Books and, in 1985, he was shown alongside his friend Graham Smith in Another Country: Photographs of the North East of England at the Serpentine Gallery in London. It was a hugely influential exhibition that prepared the ground for In Flagrante, launched at an exhibition of the same name at the Victoria and Albert Museum three years later.

In 1971, Lee Witkin, a New York gallery owner, commissioned a limited edition portfolio of Killip’s Isle of Man photographs. The advance allowed him to continue working independently and, in 1974, he was commissioned to photograph Huddersfield and Bury St Edmunds, which resulted in an exhibition, Two Views, Two Cities, held at the art galleries of each city. The following year he was given a two-year fellowship by Northern Arts to photograph the north-east. He worked in Tyneside for the next 15 years, living in a flat in Bill Quay, Gateshead, and steadily creating the body of work that would define him as a documentary photographer.

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The Photographers’ Gallery in London is staging a retrospective of his work overseen by photographer Ken Grant and curator Tracy Marshall-Grant, which they hope will bring more context to the man behind the images. It is the first exhibition on Killip since he died from cancer in 2020. Killip had spoken about the idea of a retrospective, but it was “only when he started to become ill that the conversations really accelerated”, Grant says. Chris Killip, who has died aged 74 from lung cancer, was one of Britain’s greatest documentary photographers. His most compelling work was made in the north-east of England in the late 1970s and early 80s and was rooted in the relationship of people to the places that made – and often unmade – them as the traditional jobs they relied on disappeared. In 1988 he published In Flagrante, a landmark of social documentary that has influenced generations of younger photographers. His friend and fellow photographer Martin Parr described it as “the best book about Britain since the war”. You’re going to get a picture by being there. It’s never easy. Sometimes you’re good and they’re good…I’d never seen them before and I never saw them again.” —Chris Killip Chris Killip: My camera’s very visible. It’s big. And there’s something good about this, where you have to deal with the fact that I am a photographer and I am here. Look at this great big contraption.