He did not parachute in. That is the first thing to understand about how Chris Killip worked.
In Flagrante, his 1988 book documenting communities in the northeast of England, took roughly a decade to make. Killip moved to the region in the mid-1970s. He rented a flat. He got to know people. He came back. By the time the photographs existed as a book, he had spent more time with these communities than most journalists spend with any subject in a career.
The Northeast as Subject
The geography Killip chose was specific: the coastal towns of Northumberland and County Durham, the fishing villages, the places where heavy industry had been or was in the process of disappearing. Lynemouth. Seacoal. Skinningrove. These are not places that appear in most photography books. They were not, in the 1970s and 1980s, considered worthy of sustained photographic attention.
Killip thought differently. He understood that the landscape and the communities that had grown from it were the same subject. The flat grey North Sea, the slag heaps, the horses on the beach at Lynemouth where men collected sea coal washed up by the tide – these were not backdrops. They were the situation. The geography produced the life, and the life could only be read against the geography.
Sustained Presence
There is a type of photography that treats geography as setting. The photographer arrives, finds a compelling location, positions a subject against it, and leaves. The landscape says: this is dramatic, or beautiful, or grim.
Killip’s work makes a different argument. The landscape in his photographs is not a backdrop because Killip had spent long enough in these places to understand that the people and the land had shaped each other over generations. The men collecting sea coal were doing it because the collieries had closed and coal still washed ashore and they needed the money. The geography of the beach, the fact of the sea, the specific history of the coal industry in that region – all of it is in the photograph, not because Killip explained it but because he knew it, and knowing it changed how he looked.
You cannot fake this. A photographer who spent a week in Lynemouth and photographed the seacoal men would have the surface of the same scene. But the picture would know less than Killip’s pictures know, and the viewer would feel the difference even without being able to say why.
Northeast Light and Northeast Land
The northeast of England has a particular quality of light: overcast, diffuse, the sun rarely strong enough to cast hard shadows. This suited Killip. The flat grey light that documentary photographers often treat as a problem was appropriate to what he was photographing. It did not glamorise. It did not add drama where none was intended. It rendered things as they were.
The relationship between light and landscape was not accidental. Killip chose a geography that matched the kind of photography he wanted to make. Flat land, flat sea, flat light. A landscape that does not offer the photographer easy compositions, where the work has to come from what is happening rather than from where you are standing.
This is a constraint that produces photographs. When the geography does not give you visual interest for free, you have to find what is actually there.
The Politics of Location
Choosing where to work is a political act, even when it does not feel like one. Killip chose to spend years in communities that had been largely ignored by British culture and that were, during the years he was working, being dismantled by economic policies that the rest of the country was largely indifferent to.
The northeast of England in the late 1970s and early 1980s was losing the industries that had sustained it for a century. This is the context in which Killip’s photographs exist. The geography – the specific coastline, the specific towns, the specific landscape of post-industrial decline – is not separable from the politics. The place tells the story because the place is the story.
Three Questions Worth Asking Before You Go Out
Where are you, and do you actually know it? Killip spent years learning the northeast before he had the photographs. The geography he documented was not a location he found and exploited. It was a place he understood, and the understanding is in the work.
Is the landscape your subject or your backdrop? There is a difference between photographs that happen to be set somewhere and photographs where the somewhere is the point. Killip’s photographs could not have been made anywhere else. They are about a specific geography as much as they are about specific people.
Are you present enough to be present? The photographs Killip made were possible only because the people he photographed trusted him. That trust takes time. Time requires a decision to stay somewhere, to return, to be a person in a place rather than a visitor passing through.
Using BYgo for Killip Conditions
Killip worked in overcast, northern light – conditions that BYgo would flag as low directional light, the kind of day when cloud cover is total and contrast is flat. This is exactly the light in his photographs.
If BYgo gives you an overcast forecast and you are inclined to wait for better conditions, the Killip question is worth asking: better for what? Flat light removes shadow and renders things plainly. For certain subjects and certain intentions, it is not a limitation. It is what the subject looks like.
Further Reading
In Flagrante (1988), republished as In Flagrante Two (2011) by Steidl, is the essential work. The 2011 edition includes additional photographs and an expanded essay. Seacoal (2011), also Steidl, documents the Lynemouth seacoal camp specifically.
Part of the How They Saw It series – exploring how the photographers in BYgo’s shooting briefs thought about light, time, place, and conditions.