Chris Killip
‘What Happened Great-Britain 1970-1990′
Le Bal, Paris
12.05.2012 - 19.08.2012
One of the most important British photographers, from the early 1970s Chris Killip opened up new perspectives for documentary photography whose influence is perceptible in the work of others such as Martin Parr, Tom Wood and Paul Graham.
Born in Douglas on the Isle of Man in 1946, Chris Killip took up full-time photography at 17 and was hired as assistant to a leading advertising photographer in London. Inspired by the work of Paul Strand and Walker Evans in America, Bill Brandt, August Sander and Robert Franck in Europe, in 1969 he returned to the Isle of Man whose new status as a tax haven was transforming the age-old Manx culture and way of life. Killip was determined to record its faces and landscapes, equally rugged and graceful; a world which had always seemed set in stone and was now at a tipping point.
A founding member, in 1976, of Side Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Chris Killip would spend the next twenty years among the people of the north of England, in Huddersfield, Lynemouth and Skinningrove. He immersed himself in the region, its landscape and topography, and its inhabitants. He became the chronicler of declining British industry, and the often violent confrontation between the working class and hostile economic policy.
© Le Bal