Photographic Inspirations: Chris Killip, In Flagrante (1988)

'I'm not interested in being cynical. I'm interested in being implicated.' Chris Killip

Chris Killip was part of the last generation of documentary photographers for whom black-and-white film still seemed like the natural choice for presenting their work. When did that change? Colour photography took over the amateur world of snapshots in the 60s, but the worlds of art photography and documentary lagged behind. In those fields, there were pioneers in the 1970s who worked in colour, but the definitive break was probably the publication of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency – not only for its use of colour, but also for the way it changed the whole conception of the proper relation between photographer and subject. Indeed, Killip himself has used colour for more recent work, but his photographic education was in the 1960s, and his first major project was carried out in isolation on the Isle of Man, before he moved in the mid-70s to NE England, the region that most of the imagery published in In Flagrante depicts. So his habits were formed long before the book's publication, and he has never set out to be an innovator. 

Since the major theme of the book is the consequences of deindustrialisation, there is a certain thematic rightness about its monochrome presentation: a mode associated historically with industrial modernism now used to depict its obsolescence. If that formulation sounds too abstract, we could put it more concretely: the book aims to depict working-class experience in a context where traditional working-class jobs were in decline. It also explores connections between that experience and the wider political culture and discourse (through pictures of robes for civic offices, the Miners' Strike, etc.). As Gerry Badger has observed, the book is concerned with community, but addresses this theme primarily by depicting more or less isolated individuals:

It is about how a sense of community is important, even to those on the edge. Time and again, the pain on the faces of those who have no community of any kind, who have lost their sense of community, or whom community has failed, is all too clear.

If Goldin's approach is a mode of cultural history, then Killip's book is social and economic history.

One of the reasons black and white had remained predominant among professionals through the 1960s was quite simply that newspapers were printed in black-and-white. That also remained the case into the 1980s, but the scope to publish larger documentary projects had narrowed, and insofar as there was a place to publish those in the context of journalism, it was in colour, in weekend newspaper supplements. But for a photographer like Killip, increasingly one had to make one's way in the gallery world, with book publication as the eventual goal. It had taken him several years to produce his first book, on his Isle of Man work.

 
In fact, Killip’s career is remarkable for the extent to which he waited years for the right moment or context to display work. In Flagrante includes images taken throughout Killip’s stay in the North-East, during which he worked on several separate and distinct projects: an investigation into a small, temporary group of people who lived in caravans and attempted to survive by gathering and selling waste coal from a beach; a depiction of a working-class fishing village called Skinningrove; and a series shot in a punk nightclub. But only the first is sampled extensively in the book. There are only two images included from the large body of work on Skinningrove, and another two from the nightclub series (or possibly only one: one of the concert images may have been taken elsewhere). In fact, this is a very tight, punchy edit, including only forty-nine photographs, the lowest total of any of the books we've considered.

The series from the nightclub was eventually published a couple of years ago, and I think other monographs are on the way. Killip also reviews a larger selection from the Skinningrove work in this short documentary from 2013 directed by Michael Almereyda:

 

Killip's commentary for this film makes it clear that there isn't such a large gulf separating him from Goldin. Indeed, he chose Mark Holborn to help him edit and design In Flagrante, precisely because Holborn had done the same job for The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which Killip greatly admired. And certainly his approach to documentary was quite different to that of Walker Evans or Robert Frank – rather, it followed the pioneering example of Danny Lyon, whose The Bikeriders (1968), about the Chicago Outlaws motorcycle club, initiated a way of working in which the photographer depicted 'communities from the inside, making them an integral part of his life for the duration of the project, and even afterwards'. 

Killip was from the same background as the working-class communities he documented – his father owned a pub on the Isle of Man, and Killip was expelled from school at sixteen (even though he was appointed as a professor at Harvard later in life). Instead he learned his craft as an apprentice to a commercial photographer. And like Lyon, he didn’t just visit the communities he depicted: he spent years getting to know them, years working with them, and he remained in contact with his subjects for years or even decades afterwards. For me, the key anecdote in the Skinningrove film is this one about the death of young David by drowning at sea:

At the funeral ... young David's mother asked me did I have any photographs of David? And I actually said no. And then at home in bed late that night, I woke up with a start and realised the woman wasn't asking me, did I have any photographs that I wanted to exhibit? She was asking me, did I have any pictures of her dead son? So I got out of bed and started looking at my contact sheets, and two weeks later, I cam back to the village and gave her an album. I think it had thirty-six photographs of David in it, from when he was thirteen to when he was seventeen.

One photographer reports Killip asking him, ‘Do you ever visit the people you photograph without a camera?’ A question that wouldn’t make much sense either to Walker Evans or to Goldin, although for different reasons. 

Killip's photographs are not only the culmination of a particular tradition: they also represent an extraordinary technical achievement. They were all taken on a 4x5 large-format camera, borrowing a technique from Weegee, in that Killip often used flash, even in daylight. This allowed him to shoot handheld, presumably by presetting the exposure and focal distance to match the flash parameters, and sticking to subjects positioned within that range. Evans – and most other photographers, including myself – usually use large-format cameras to photograph architecture or landscape. Killip instead primarily used it to photograph life in flux: people in the midst of unfolding – and sometimes dynamic – situations. In the 1980s, this self-imposed task must have seemed quixotic, but, as the example of Weegee suggests, it was once the norm for press photographers to shoot handheld on 4x5 cameras, so it was far from unprecedented. Because of the large negatives and the even lighting, the results are extraordinarily rich in detail, and thereby portray the full, intense human presence of the people shown in a way that enlargements from 35mm negatives just can't compete with. If the supposed justification for the roughness of Robert Frank's imagery was that it was an inevitable consequence of the attempt to catch life on the fly, then Killip gives the lie to that claim.

The design of the first edition of In Flagrante is straightforward, so one imagines that Holborn's main contribution was with regard to the selection and sequencing of the images. There is one significant difference to the other books we've been discussing: the majority of spreads feature one image, but most are enlarged over the gutter rather than confined to the recto. These split images are all in landscape format, but some spreads, particular those with an image in portrait format, have two images, one per page (these doubled spreads are all at the end of the book). 

There's a short note from Killip at the beginning, which acknowledges the relatively privileged position from which he worked:

To the people in these photographs I am superfluous, my life does not depend on their struggle, only my hopes. This is a subjective book about my time in England. I take what isn't mine and I covet other peoples lives. The photographs can tell you more about me than about what they describe. The book is a fiction about metaphor.

The last sentence is a curious statement,  which acknowledges the undeniably fictive – that is, constructed, structured – nature of all art, but feels like an attempt to pre-empt then-current postmodern modes of criticism. There are two isolated images in the prelims before the sequence proper begins, one of which shows an amateur painter on a windy beach, as if to acknowledge the common basis of his and Killip's representational projects. It might also be worth noting that a selection of Killip's images was published prior to the book in a 1986 issue of Aperture magazine on the theme of 'Fiction and Metaphor' – an issue that also included excerpts from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. 

One should not read Killip's disclaimer as an admission of outright invention though, as in Love on the Left Bank. In fact, beyond the general opening statement, In Flagrante lays out the photographs with no accompanying text at all – not even captions. At the end of the book, there is an afterword by John Berger and Sylvia Grant, but even that doesn't refer directly to the images. Berger is a fine writer, including on photography, but his and Grant's contribution really doesn't feel essential here, although it does attempt to expand on Killip's opening statement:

Fiction, I think, because it is a story, not just information. About a human tragedy not an accident. Metaphor because it is through metaphor that, at first and last, we seek for meaning.

In 2015, Steidl published a second edition of In Flagrante, with a number of changes requested by Killip. The opening disclaimer/statement was omitted, as was the original afterword, along with one of the introductory photographs. It also removed two other framing photographs at the beginning and end of the sequence proper in which Killip's cast shadow intrudes into images of the same scene, showing a woman seemingly unconscious at a bus stop – images that are not only uncharacteristically brutal, but also uncharacteristically reflexive. Perhaps, like the original disclaimer/statement, they were also included to head off objections that all documentary work is by definition similarly compromised. 

The second edition instead added three other images at various points within the sequence to replace the omissions. At the end of the book, there was a new note stating that it covers a period in which Britain was governed by several named prime ministers (presumably to refute the too easy characterisation of the subject matter as Thatcherite Britain). And finally there was now a list of simple captions with accompanying thumbnail versions of the images.

 

The digital printing in the Steidl edition seems to capture a longer tonal range and have sharper edge definition than the analogue first edition (I suspect this may be the case more generally with digital reprints, e.g. of The New West as well). In addition, the pages are now bound in landscape format instead of portrait, and the images are all presented one per spread on the recto, in the classic American Photographs manner. Interestingly, the few vertical images are now printed rotated on their sides, as in the old-fashioned mode of the first edition of Paris After Dark.  

Doug Dubois regrets the decision not to retain the more active use of the gutter in the first edition, from which he learned that:

You can shift an image wherever you need—left, right, or off-center—so that the gutter bisects the photograph precisely where you want it, not simply where it lands relative to the page border. (While hardly an innovation unique to Killip or this book, this was a revelation for me.) .... I miss the choreography of the first edition; the engagement of the photographs with the gutter contributed to a restless dynamic that carried through the sequence of images. 

Given that Killip was for many years a professor of photography at Harvard, it's unsurprising to discover he was also an eloquent interpreter of other people's photographs: for example, in this short discussion of an image by Walker Evans.

Together with the South African photographer David Goldblatt, with whom he has much in common, Killip is probably the photographer I admire the most. And yet I’d be hard-pressed to point to any picture of mine that demonstrates his influence (unlike Evans, or even Goldin). In large part that’s because my photographs on the streets in Venice are of people I don’t know and never spoke to. Indeed I can’t imagine emulating Killip’s approach in this regard: the idea of approaching strangers more directly, let alone trying to persuade them to let me into their lives on an ongoing basis, fills me with horror. My photographs instead authentically depict my experience of the world at that point: as a potentially hostile place filled with anonymous and inscrutable individuals who it is not possible to know, who can only be observed in passing. And indeed that was and is the nature of contemporary Venice: most of the people present in the city on any given day don’t live there, and won’t be there the following week. On the other hand, I photographed a city whose history I had already spent years researching and writing about. So in that sense I was fully embedded in the world I photographed, which I also depicted over a period of several years.

 
I took the photographs featured in Push Process from 2002–5 (with a couple of outliers from 2008). But my research into photographic history stopped at about 1990. Since my project was explicitly a historical one, looking backwards, I didn’t feel the need to engage beyond that cut-off point. So in a sense Killip represented the natural end point of photographic history for me. In other words, while he chose to use black-and-white film because he still saw it as part of a living tradition – indeed, he didn't really choose it at all; it was simply the mode in which one presented serious documentary work – for me that choice was already a conscious and deliberate anachronism.

Hence my posts on the inspirations for Push Process end here – apart from a coda in which I'll return to the 1910s in the form of a review of a seminal book on the work of Eugène Atget.