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 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. Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you. 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 Chris Killip’s work is impassioned, urgent – but it is rarely tragic, despite the circumstances faced by many of the people he photographed, and remained close to, over the course of his life. There are images that will evoke tragedy in some audiences, but then, for Killip, it was never about audiences.

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.” 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. 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 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.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. 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

For the next few years, Killip worked at night in his father’s pub and, by day, travelled the island shooting his first series of landscapes and portraits. The island had become a tax haven for outsiders and Killip rightly sensed that its traditional jobs were under threat. He set out to evoke that disappearing way of life and, in doing so, set the tone for much of what was to follow, not just in terms of his choice of subject matter, but in his formal rigour and deeply immersive, slowly evolving approach. Clive Dilnot, ‘Chris Killip: The Last Photographer of the Working Class’, afterimage, vol.39, May–June 2012. 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)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. 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." 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