Chris Killip was a British photographer best known for his work documenting the working classes in the North of England throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Killip's landmark publication In Flagrante, published in 1988, has been recognised by critics as one of the greatest photography books to come out of Britain for its depiction of Northern communities working their way through the changing landscape of Thatcher's Britain.
A photographer who embedded himself within the community he photographed, Killip came to know many of his subjects personally, building up relationships over months and sometimes years. Focusing on those most directly affected by the decline of industry in Northeast England, Killip's pictures and portraits from the Isle of Man, North Yorkshire, Skinningrove, and Lynemouth are stripped bare of pretense and remain an immediate record of individual community experience in light of a much larger, politically-charged climate.
Killip was a founding member of Side Gallery, in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, and served as its director from 1977-1979. In 1989 he received the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award. Since 1991, Killip has been teaching in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was tenured in 1994.
A photographer who embedded himself within the community he photographed, Killip came to know many of his subjects personally, building up relationships over months and sometimes years. Focusing on those most directly affected by the decline of industry in Northeast England, Killip's pictures and portraits from the Isle of Man, North Yorkshire, Skinningrove, and Lynemouth are stripped bare of pretense and remain an immediate record of individual community experience in light of a much larger, politically-charged climate.
Killip was a founding member of Side Gallery, in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, and served as its director from 1977-1979. In 1989 he received the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award. Since 1991, Killip has been teaching in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was tenured in 1994.