Seacoal

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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. Chris Killip began photographing the people of Lynemouth seacoal beach in the north east of England in 1982, after nearly seven years of failed efforts to obtain their consent. During 1983 to 1984 he lived in a caravan on the seacoal camp and documented the life, work and the struggle to survive on the beach, using his unflinching style of objective documentation. Fifty of the one hundred and twenty four images published here, were first shown in 1984 at the Side Gallery in Newcastle and others were an important element of Killip’s ground-breaking and legendary book In Flagrante, published four years later. Aged 74, Chris died peacefully at home in Cambridge, Mass., his wife Mary and son Matt at his bedside. Thank you, Chris, for everything. Further reading 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.

LH: So, in the photographs where intimate stuff is happening, the people aren’t really looking at you, necessarily. They’re just going about their lives. Do you then wait for the moment that you want? Do you let life just happen? Elsewhere is his work made in the North Yorkshire fishing village of Skinningrove, “a place which was willfully kept by the people who lived there unkempt”, says Grant, describing how people fished and worked in the local iron smelter. “Several of the people he photographed, they died because of drowning, and Chris was very much part of the aftermath of that situation, making pictures of the families.” Family on a Sunday walk, Skinningrove, 1982 Bever, Skinningrove, North Yorkshire, 1983 Clive Dilnot, ‘Chris Killip: The Last Photographer of the Working Class’, afterimage, vol.39, May–June 2012. 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).When Richard Avedon and Annie Leibovitz take a picture, we recognize the fame of the person. It’s harder to take a picture of someone that’s completely unknown and make it interesting, because they’re not famous. They’re anonymous. They are full of admiration for the work and admiration for the pictures in the way they capture people. I think when we go to the Baltic it will be much more about the people and how they recognise themselves."

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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.