Chris Killip (1946–2020)

Late in 2016 Chris Killip’s son serendipitously discovered a box of contact sheets of the photos his father had made at The Station, an anarcho-punk music venue in Gateshead open from 1981 to 1985. These images of raw youth caught in the heat of celebration had lain dormant for 30 years; they now return to life in this book. The Station was not merely a music and rehearsal space, but a crucible for the self-expression of the sub-cultures and punk politics of the time. As Killip recollects: “When I first went to The Station in April 1985, I was amazed by the energy and feel of the place. It was totally different, run for and by the people who went there. Every Saturday that I could, I photographed there. Nobody ever asked me where I was from or even who I was. A 39-year-old with cropped white hair, always wearing a suit, with pockets stitched inside the jacket to hold my slides. With a 4 × 5 camera around my neck and a Norman flash and its battery around my waist, I must have looked like something out of a 1950s B movie. 1985 was just after the miners strike and there was a lot of youth unemployment. Most of the punks at The Station didn’t have a job, and this place, run as a very inclusive collective, was so important to them and their self-worth.”… (altro)

Errata Editions' Books on Books series is an ongoing publishing project dedicated to making rare and out-of-print photography books accessible to students and photobook enthusiasts. These are not reprints or facsimiles but complete studies of the original books. Each volume in the series presents the entire content, page for page, of an original master bookwork which, up until now, has been too rare or expensive for most to experience. Through a mix of classic and contemporary titles, this series spans the breadth of photographic practice as it has appeared on the printed page and allows further study of the creation and meanings of these great works of art. Each volume in the series contains illustrations of every page in the original photobook, a new essay by an established writer on photography, production notes about the creation of the original edition and biographical and bibliographical information about each artist.
Often referenced as the most important photobook to come out of England in the 1980s, Chris Killip's In Flagrante stands the test of time today. Published in 1988, In Flagrante shows the communities in Northern England that were devastated by the deindustrialization common to policies carried out by Margaret Thatcher and her predecessors starting in the mid-1970s. Books on Books 4 presents Killip's political yet lyric work along with a new essay, "Dispatches from a War Zone" by noted photo historian and critic Gerry Badger.… (altro)

In Pirelli Work, taken at the famous tire manufacturer's plant, UK photographer Chris Killip (born 1946) documents the factory setting and the workers. One of the novelties of this work is in the lighting: the photographer mimicked fashion techniques, illuminating his subjects with three or four lights triggered by remote control, plus a light held on a pole away from the camera. "The workplace had become, in a real sense for me, a theater," he has said, "I embraced the look of these new photographs with their relation to fashion, film noir, and even Soviet Realism. For me this 'look' seemed a more telling way to record and document this enforced ritual."… (altro)