I am still wondering how it is possible, after so many years of attending exhibitions, reading about it, and being immersed in it, the name of a contemporary photographer of importance remained completely unknown to me? And that of “one of the most influential British photographers of his generation”? Amazing shortage of knowledge! The name is Killip, Chris Killip. Born in 1946 on the Isle of Man, Chris Killip, after a career as a commercial photographer, started to record the lives of the inhabitants of his native island. Inspired by the photograph of Henri Cartier-Bresson depicting a young boy carrying two bottles of milk, he continued by expanding his horizon to the North-East of England in the 1970 and during the Thatcher years in the 1980’s. His series like Seacoal and Skinningrove give us a view of life in remote areas of the UK. Areas left out of the London wealth and attention, where people visibly struggle in their day-to-day lives, where the sense of community is the only thing they share. Killip, in a way, is for me the Ken Loach of photography: he lives an impression of profound connection and empathy with the people he photographed, like Ken Loach did in his films. Same people left behind by society and progress, and yet showing their deep sense of humanity. Killip said it himself “I wanted to record people’s lives because I valued them. I wanted them to be remembered. If you take a photograph of someone, they are immortalized, they’re there forever. For me that was important, that you’re acknowledging people’s lives, and also contextualizing people’s lives”. The large retrospective at the Fotomuseum of The Hague is a tribute to his immense work.
