Most photographers set an alarm for golden hour. Killip did not appear to own one.
In Flagrante, his 1988 monograph documenting the working communities of northeast England during the Thatcher years, contains almost no golden hour photography. No warm light bouncing romantically off wet cobblestones. No long shadows doing anything interesting. What it contains instead is the flat, grey, non-committal light of an overcast Tuesday in November, the light of a place that had no interest in being picturesque, photographed by someone who had no interest in making it so.
This is worth paying attention to.
The Golden Hour Is Not the Point
Photography has a near-religious relationship with the golden hour. The hour after sunrise, the hour before sunset — warm, directional, flattering to almost anything you point a camera at. Apps are built around it. Whole philosophies of practice have been constructed on top of it.
Killip’s subjects were not available on that schedule. The skinners at Lynemouth, the sea-coalers on the beach, the families in Seacoal Camp: they lived in continuous time, and Killip worked alongside them for years. The light he photographed in was the light that existed when something was happening. That was the only rule.
This is not indifference to light. It is a different kind of attention to it.
What Flat Light Actually Does
Overcast, diffuse light has specific properties that served Killip’s purposes exactly.
It removes the hierarchy that directional light creates. Strong raking light pulls the eye to highlights first, then shadows. The light itself becomes the dominant compositional element, which is fine if the light is the subject. Killip’s subject was people. Flat light distributes attention evenly across faces, hands, textures, the space between figures. Every part of the frame gets the same amount of looking.
It also removes the urgency of the clock. Killip was not waiting for a window. Ten in the morning or two in the afternoon, the light behaved the same way. This suited a practice built on sustained presence rather than well-timed arrivals.
And flat grey light does something particular with black-and-white film. Without colour drama to carry the image, tonal relationships in the midtones do the work. Killip’s prints are remarkable documents of what the middle of the tonal range can hold, not the bright whites or the deep blacks, but everything in between.
When the Hour Did Matter
The few Killip photographs that carry the quality of early morning do so because the activity he was documenting required it. The sea-coalers worked at low tide. Low tide sometimes fell at first light. The light in those images is not there because Killip planned for it. It is there because he had been present long enough that he was simply there when the tide went out.
There is a difference between going out at golden hour to make photographs that look like golden hour photographs, and being present long enough that any hour’s light becomes part of what you are recording. Killip was doing the second thing.
Three Questions Worth Asking Before You Go Out
What does the subject require, rather than what do the conditions permit? If you are photographing people in the middle of their lives, the middle of the day is probably where you need to be. That is when things happen.
What does flat light allow that golden light prevents? Without a dominant light source to manage, you can move freely across the frame and concentrate on what is in front of you rather than what is happening behind you in the sky.
How long are you willing to stay? Killip’s light is inseparable from his commitment to time. The photographs in In Flagrante were not made on a three-day visit. They were made over years. The light was whatever it was.
Using BYgo for Killip Conditions
BYgo’s Brief tab will sometimes return conditions that most photographers would dismiss: heavy overcast, flat light, high cloud cover and point to photographers like Killip who made precisely those conditions the foundation of their practice.
If you search a northern city in autumn and BYgo tells you the light is flat and diffuse, that is not a warning. It is a description of Killip’s working environment. The question the brief is asking is whether you know what to do with it.
Further Reading
In Flagrante (1988) is the essential text. The reissue In Flagrante Two (2016) adds later work and critical context. Killip’s work is held in major collections internationally.
Part of the How They Saw It series – exploring how the photographers in BYgo’s shooting briefs thought about light, time, place, and conditions. Next: Fan Ho on Geography.