Chris Killip @ The Photographers’ Gallery : Ricardo Pimentel

7 October 2022 – 19 February 2023

Retrospective

My Penguin copy of Samuel Beckett’s ‘The Expelled and Other Novellas’ has, on its cover, a photograph of a man sitting on a brick wall. Only the lower half of his body is showing, giving the appearance of two legs dangling, as if we are viewing a hanging. Quite a startling image; I never forgot it after all these years.

As I turned a corner on my way around the Chris Killip retrospective at the Photographers’ Gallery, there it was, blown up large and still startling. In fact quite a few of the photographs were familiar, yet I’m embarrassed to admit, the name Chris Killip wasn’t.

Killip, was a photographer with a mission. To give a voice to those people and communities, particularly in the North of England, whose lives were affected by the country’s economic shifts in the 1970s and 1980s. Certainly there were similarities with Dorothea Lange’s Great Depression era photographs, Don McCullin’s ‘England’ series of photographs as well as those by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Paul Strand.

However, Killip’s photographs have a political edge which gives them added significance. His purpose was not just to document change, it was to document the effects of economic policy on those who do not shape it, but who experience its effects most keenly. As Killip himself stated it’s a story of those who have history ‘done to them’.

Two aspects of this collection of photographs make them stand out.

Despite the grinding poverty and the bleakness of the lives they depict, the subjects are not down trodden. The often direct look into the camera, conveys a sense of pride and self-belief. These are not people who easily yield to what life throws at them. They believe in a sense of community and in each other. The fact that Killip was able to capture this is a testament to his quality as a photographer. Embedded in these communities he was clearly able to gain their trust and convince them that theirs was a story worth telling. But Killip isn’t just giving us an insight into how communities are affected by political and economic change. He is also holding a mirror up to us and asking ‘what kind of society do you want to live in? These are the people and communities our decisions affect’.

The collateral damage of global Capitalism and the pursuit of neo-liberal economic policies, is here for us all to see.

Below is a selection of the many excellent photographs in this exhibition.