The Photographers’ Gallery, London // October 07, 2022 – February 19, 2023
Chris Killip, “Gordon in the water”, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth (1983) © Chris Killip Photography Trust/Magnum Photos
Chris Killip, “Helen and her Hula-hoop”, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, Northumbria (1984) © Chris Killip Photography Trust/Magnum Photos
Chris Killip, “Bever”, Skinningrove, N. Yorkshire (1983) © Chris Killip Photography Trust/Magnum Photos
The Photographers’ Gallery in London is currently hosting a retrospective exhibition of the work of Chris Killip, one of the most influential figures in British photography. This exhibition, which features over 140 works, is the most comprehensive survey of Killip’s career to date and includes previously unseen works.
His sustained immersion into the communities he photographed remains without parallel. Whilst marking a moment of deindustrialisation, Killip’s stark yet tender observation moves beyond the urgency to record such circumstances, to affirm the value of lives he grew close to – lives that, as he once described ‘had history done to them’, who felt history’s malicious disregard and yet, like the photographer himself, refused to yield or look away.
Against a background of shipbuilding and coal mining, he witnessed the togetherness of communities and the industries that sustained them and stayed long enough to see their loss.
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