The village of Skinningrove lies on the North-East coast of England, halfway between Middlesbrough and Whitby. Hidden in a steep valley it veers away from the main road and faces out onto the North Sea. Like a lot of tight-knit fishing communities it could be hostile to strangers, especially one with a camera.

“Now Then” is the standard greeting in Skinningrove; a challenging substitute for the more usual, “Hello”. The place had a definite ‘edge’ and it took time for this stranger to be tolerated. My greatest ally in gaining acceptance was ‘Leso’ (Leslie Holliday), the most outgoing of the younger fishermen. Leso and I never talked about what I was doing there. but when someone questioned my presence, he would intercede and vouch for me with, ‘He’s OK’. This simple endorsement was enough.’

We gaven de lezer al een aanduiding waar Chris Killip één van zijn fotografische verhalen vertelde in de tachtiger jaren.
We laten hem nu zelf aan het woord.
Beluister en bekijk zijn verhaal hieronder. Je kunt altijd ‘ondertiteling’ inschakelen mocht het ietsje te zacht klinken.
Het is een belangrijk verhaal, ongewoon wellicht voor een fotograaf, maar in deze ‘goede week’ helemaal wat het moet zijn: verbinding. Luister en bekijk hoe hij over zijn ‘onderwerpen’ (vergeef me de oneerbiedige benaming) mensen dus, spreekt.

‘When you’re photographing you’re caught up in the moment, trying to deal as best you can with what’s in front of you. At that moment you’re not thinking that a photograph is also, and inevitably, a record of a death foretold. A photograph’s relationship to memory is complex. Can memory ever be made real or is a photograph sometimes the closest we can come to making our memories seem real.’

“I didn’t have a political agenda. I liked the area a lot, and wanted to photograph it as well as I could. I was aware of the sense of history, more than politics; the idea that things will change, and nothing lasts forever.”

“That’s why you should give it your utmost to try and take the best photographs you can. It was only with hindsight that you can see things like – I am the chronicler of the deindustrialisation revolution. At the time, I was not that conscious of that, but I was focused on photographing all the industries I could, even with limited access. Because I knew it was important.”

Thatcher did not believe in society, yet of course society persisted. Killip excels at showing just that persistence: a community eking a living, even a life, from the scraps, the ruins, the flames, the waves, the dirt. More radically, our current masters do not believe in the state, whose death they are likely to be more successful in bringing about. If so, it will have the effect of rendering many effectively if not literally stateless — and thus conveniently invisible. But whoever emerges to document their tragedy could do far worse than study In Flagrante, an essential visual record of a sociopolitical disaster, which shows you probably can’t get to the heart of your subject without making yourself part of it. Just remind yourself that it comes from a time when these souls could still feed themselves without food banks, were not forced to move home for the crime of having a spare room, and when Jeremy Corbyn’s boldest ideas would have been considered meekly centrist. And then shudder.

‘I remember speaking with Josef Koudelka in 1975 about why I should stay in Newcastle. Josef said that you could bring in six Magnum photographers, and they could stay and photograph for six weeks – and he felt that inevitably their photographs would have a sort of similarity. As good as they were, their photographs wouldn’t get beyond a certain point. But if you stayed for two years, your pictures would be different, and if you stayed for three years they would be different again. You could get under the skin of a place and do something different, because you were then photographing from the inside. I understood what he was talking about. I stayed in Newcastle for fifteen years. I mean, to get the access to photograph the sea-coal workers took eight years. You do get embroiled in a place.’

(Feestdag koninklijke bruiloft Diana and Charles 1981)

Born in Douglas, Isle of Man in 1946, he left school at age sixteen and joined the only four star hotel on the Isle of Man as a trainee hotel manager. In June 1964 he decided to pursue photography full time and became a beach photographer in order to earn enough money to leave the Isle of Man. In October 1964 he was hired as the third assistant to the leading London advertising photographer Adrian Flowers. He then worked as a freelance assistant for various photographers in London from 1966-69. In 1969, after seeing his very first exhibition of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he decided to return to photograph in the Isle of Man. He worked in his father’s pub at night returning to London on occasion to print his work. On a return visit to the USA in 1971, Lee Witkin, the New York gallery owner, commissioned a limited edition portfolio of the Isle of Man work, paying for it in advance so that Killip could continue to photograph.

In 1972 he received a commission from The Arts Council of Great Britain to photograph Huddersfield and Bury St Edmunds for the exhibition Two Views – Two Cities. In 1975, he moved to live in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on a two year fellowship as the Northern Arts Photography Fellow. He was a founding member, exhibition curator and advisor of Side Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, as well as its director, from 1977-9. He continued to live in Newcastle and photographed throughout the North East of England, and from 1980-85 made occasional cover portraits for The London Review of Books. In 1989 he was commissioned by Pirelli UK to photograph the workforce at their tyre factory in Burton-on-Trent. In 1989 he received the Henri Cartier Bresson Award and in 1991 was invited to be a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University. In 1994 he was made a tenured professor and was department chair from 1994-98. He retired from Harvard in December 2017 and continues to live in the USA.

‘Great photographers need determination not talent’

https://www.howardyezerski.com/killip

http://www.chriskillip.com/

Hij heeft veel gezien.
Drieënnegentig geworden, geleefd in de tijdspanne tussen 1922-2016, op straat te vinden vooral in Parijs en New York die hij zijn ‘spirituel mothers’ noemde.
Het dagelijkse leven van dagelijkse mensen als onderwerp voor zijn camera.
Begonnen op zijn dertiende, aangemoedigd door Alfred Steiglitz en Paul Strand vind je nu zijn collecties in het Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art en in hetVictoria and Albert Museum.
Ondanks de museumtentoonstellingen bleef hij toch lang onbekend bij het grote publiek.

Greatly appreciated by fellow photographers and discerning collectors, the problem as photography critic Kelly Wise aptly states: “rarely is his work shown in breadth.” Which is precisely the purpose of his book Early Joys. Slowly a legend has blossomed about his early photographs (1947 – 1972) that has strongly influenced young photographers. Yet its true scope and depth has been only available to those fortunate enough to visit his print room.

There is a most stirring and perceptive Introduction by his teacher and lifelong friend, the famous French photographer Brassai (Stettner is the only photographer to be honored): “Stettner has always been fully conscious that the role of the photographer is not to turn away from all reference to reality, but on the contrary to express a profound experience with it.”

Mr. Stettner, a New Yorker, was a product of the ‘Photo League’ and its emphasis on socially conscious, documentary work, exemplified by members and supporters like Weegee, Berenice Abbott and Robert Frank.
“I have never been interested in photographs based solely on aesthetics, divorced from reality,” he wrote in his photo collection “Wisdom Cries Out in the Streets,” published in 1999. “I also doubt very much whether this is possible.”
While living in Paris after World War II, he also found inspiration in a new wave of French photographers, including Robert Doisneau, Brassaï and Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose outlook seemed to dovetail with the league’s. (William Grimes NY Times)

(Hieronder Christmas Eve 1950)

He began studying photographs at the print room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and observing, through the camera’s lens, the streets around him. New York was his subject, the place he described as “a city I love, a city that forgives nothing but accepts everyone — a place of a thousand varied moods and vistas, of countless faces in a moving crowd, each one silently talking to you.” (ibidem)

Stettner’s elaborate shrug is typical of the masters of his form and kind. Photographers tend, vocationally, to understate the intellectual preparation necessary to their work, as other visual artists tend to overstate theirs. The myth of accident – I was there, that’s what I saw, you would have seen the same – remains essential to the form, in part because the element of serendipity really is essential to its beauty: if we try to make photographs too artful, we miss what makes them art. (Adam Gopnik)

Terwijl nu iedereen te beginnen met de lagere school-kinderen minstens één camera op zak heeft, vraag je je af of er van het dagelijkse leven nog foto’s overblijven die niet ontsierd worden door het gezicht van de selfie-fotograaf.
(Voor het tegendeel verwijs ik je graag naar het ‘dagboek’ van Luc Dewaele)
https://lucdewaele.com

Het ogen-blik in elke foto vastgehouden mag zich blijven uitstrekken voor al de ogen die er  later hun blik op richten, en dank zij de kunde van de fotograaf de ruimte herkennen, alsof ze ooit de onze was, en voortaan inderdaad van ons geworden is en zal blijven.

Ons lot aan elkaar verbonden, waar we ook ter wereld verblijven.

(met Franse ondertiteling)