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It took him a long time to get in with the Seacolers. They had no idea who he was and he faced violence the first time he tried to photograph them," he told ITV Tyne Tees. It’s fair to say Graham lived a wild life when he was shooting,” says Parr. “He had rough times, drinking, sleeping out. But I think of him as one of the great characters of photography. He’s a bit like Josef Koudelka in that way. Until you sit down with him, and hear the stories, you don’t get it. And, of course, his legend has only grown in his absence.” In the following the legal basis for the processing of personal data required by Art. 6 I 1 GDPR is listed. Apart from a commercial exhibition in Santa Monica, California, in 2008, entitled Three from Britain, in which his work was exhibited alongside Killip’s and Parr’s, Smith has not allowed his pictures to be shown in a gallery until now. His isolation in rural Northumberland seems to have led to a kind of creative reinvention as a writer, with both Edwards and Parr attesting to his skill at recalling the people and places he photographed decades ago.

Chris Killip retrospective adds depth to a remarkable career Chris Killip retrospective adds depth to a remarkable career

Much, though, has changed in the interim, both in terms of the physical and social landscape the pair captured for posterity, and in the fortunes of the two photographers. Killip, who died of lung cancer in October 2020, is now generally recognised as a master of British documentary photography. His 1988 book In Flagrante remains a classic of the genre and, although he all but retreated into academia in 1991, becoming a professor at Harvard, his photographs have been exhibited around the world. A deftly curated and long overdue retrospective of his work has just opened the Photographers Gallery in London, burnishing his already elevated status as perhaps the most acute chronicler of the human cost of what he later called the “de-industrialisation” of the north-east. 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 Chris Killip, born on the Isle of Man in 1946, is a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University where he has taught since 1991.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, 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 More wounding still was a scurrilous report that appeared in a popular north-eastern newspaper under the heading Boozers and Losers, misrepresenting the work as voyeuristic and patronising. An accompanying editorial described the photographers as “a couple of smart alecs from Middlesbrough and Newcastle” – Killip was actually from the Isle of Man – and culminated with the suggestion: “Someone should hang THEM on the walls.” Gordon in the water, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth, 1983. Credit: Chris Killip Photography Trust/Martin Parr Foundation

‘We wanted to value and document working-class culture’: the

Chris Killip/Graham Smith is at Augusta Edwards, London, until 6 November. Chris Killip, Retrospective is at the Photographers Gallery, London, until 19 February That possibility, alongside the death of Killip, cannot help but lend the exhibition an almost valedictory feel. It is also, like the original iteration, a celebration of their friendship, their mutual respect and the ways in which their different approaches to documentary interact on the walls of the gallery like a lively visual conversation. In his catalogue essay, though, Smith recalls how he initially refused Killip the use of his newly constructed darkroom when the latter first arrived in Newcastle upon Tyne and introduced himself to the pioneering Amber collective that Smith belonged to. “They were chalk and cheese, temperamentally,” says Parr, “and there could be tension between them, but ultimately they knew what they believed in.” The images here are included in an exhibition at the Getty Museum, Now Then: Chris Killip and the Making of In Flagrante (May 23–August 13, 2017). 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

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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 Unlike Killip, Smith belonged to the community he had photographed. The people who were “defiled” in the article, he writes, “were mostly people from the close community of South Bank, the home town and workplace of my father and his father.” That, too, resonates in the work, in the two differing approaches to the same end: the recording of ordinary, working-class lives at the mercy of economic and ideological forces that devalued them. Smith describes the Amber collective as “a group of idealists guided by a philosophy to create a dialogue with working-class communities, to value and document their culture, to live cheaply and be in control of our own labour.” That idealism also seems to belong to another time, another country, but it underpinned two bodies of work that have grown in importance as time has passed. Killip could have been speaking for both of them when he said of his subjects, “In recording their lives, I’m valuing their lives.” 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. 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