Chris Killip

Christopher David Killip (11 July 1946 – 13 October 2020)[1][2] was a Manx photographer who worked at Harvard University from 1991 to 2017, as a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies.

Killip received the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award [fr; cs] (for In Flagrante) and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.

These black and white images, "portraits of Tyneside's working class communities amongst the signifiers of the region's declining industrial landscape",[4] mostly made on 4×5 film, are now recognised as among the most important visual records of living in 1980s Britain.

[2] Gerry Badger describes the photographs as "taken from a point of view that opposed everything [Thatcher] stood for", and the book as "about community", "a dark, pessimistic journey".

[6] The book In Flagrante was well received on its publication in 1988, but Killip's kind of black and white documentation of the underclass was going out of fashion quickly in Britain, as photographers used colour to show consumerism and for consciously and explicitly artistic purposes.

Attempting to use available light in a darkened factory in which work was done on a black product, he was at first unsuccessful, but in June he switched to flash and a large-format camera and photographed for three more months.