Chris Killip

To the Photographers’ Gallery for an exhibition of photographs by Chris Killip, whom I encountered in Liverpool. (I think I may also have seen his shipbuilding photographs in the Laing a couple of years ago, but I’m not sure.) He tried to photograph those “who’d had history done to them”, and he succeeded wonderfully. There were some from the early 1970s Isle of Man (where he was born): another world. Even the placenames were strange: “Interior, Cooilslieu, Greeba”. The hand-knitted cardigans with buttons the colour (I imagined) of boiled sweets. Dirty fingernails and darned clothes. Girls and women photographed in doorways, one destined to be transformed into the other. I liked the identical earnest expressions of both the whippet fancier and his whippets. The Wallsend photographs (with the tanker “Tyne Pride” being constructed in the background) documented the demolition of the streets. Later photographs from the 1980s didn’t suggest that the replacements were any better.

It was in the Skinningrove and Lynemouth series that Killip was most interesting, for he followed the lives of the fishing village and sea coal gatherers respectively over a long period, and the same faces crop up at work and in their free time. You get a sense of individuals within their community, with the physical work, risks and harsh weather that they endured. (Yes, I was fully aware that I have clean fingernails, nice clothes and a comfortable life as I looked at images of children picking over washed-up coal in a biting north-easterly.)

And then the couple at Askam-in-Furness. 1982. 1982! It looks more like 1952.