It really took me 20 years to understand what he was seeing. There’s no filter, there’s no posing, there’s none of that, ‘Let’s prepare for the moment to be photographed.’ There’s the minimum there could be between the photographer and what’s happening. It’s as raw and real as possible, and looking through the images, I feel like I’m there.”

Chris Killip photographed in the north of England during the 1970s and 80s, when the country’s three main heavy industries—steelworks, shipyards, and coal mines—went into decline. Killip calls the resulting book, In Flagrante, a “portrait of working class struggles at that time.” 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 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 KillipBorn in Douglas on the Isle of Man, Killip worked as freelance commercial photographer in the 1960s, before turning to documentary. In 1975 he was granted a two-year fellowship to photograph in the north-east and the first evidence of how important his images were came in May 1977, when Creative Camera magazine devoted an entire issue to his work in progress. The Bobby Sand image with the graffiti “Bobbie Sands greedy Irish pig” was taken on the day Mrs. Thatcher announced his death and, hopefully, serves the book well with its historical/political/social context. 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.

I also added new images, two of which are very helpful in contextualizing the work without using explanatory text. The image following these is of a working class-terraced housing in Wallsend, with the third image from the end showing the same housing being demolished, acting as an obvious comment on deindustrialization as well as context.To celebrate the In Flagrante‘s reprint, as well as the Yossi Milo Gallery show that accompanies it, TIME LightBox asked photographer Martin Parr– an avid collector of Killip’s prints – to discuss the book’s legacy and rebirth with its author.

Chris Killip: It’s certainly perceived as my finest achievement. In Flagrante Two is different. Better? We will have to see what the jury makes of it. I was 42 and living in England when In Flagrante came out and when In Flagrante Two comes out I will be 69 having spent the last 25 years living and teaching in the U.S. Maybe that’s the big difference, 28 years of hindsight. 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?Since its publication in 1988, Chris Killip’s In Flagrante has been hailed as a masterpiece of photojournalism – a book that not only influenced many of Killip’s contemporaries but also came to be defined, wrongly, says the photographer, as a savage criticism of Margaret Thatcher’s years as U.K.’s Prime Minister.

Chris Killip: After living in the U.S. for 25 years I don’t think that it’s likely that I will ever return to Britain to live but I very much enjoy visiting and do so two or three times a year. The Errata edition also started me rethinking and while I had always turned down the offers to do a facsimile edition I now did want to do something. In 2014, I started playing around with ideas and realized that I had some basic aims in mind if I was to do anything: Martin Parr: You have said before that you would never re-do In Flagrante. What made you change your mind?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