Chris Killip: North

A striking interpretation of Killip’s work in the Northeast of England and Ireland between 1975 and 1986, featuring many previously unpublished photographs.

From Huddersfield to fishing communities on the North Yorkshire coast and the fury of the miners’ strike, Chris Killip’s lens captured the divisions and communities that define England. Born in the Isle of Man in 1946, he spent much of his career documenting life in the North of England, shining a light on the economic and social difficulties that haunted those communities.

While operating in the documentary tradition, Killip’s work is marked by tenderness, by a refusal to cast his subjects as easily dismissible stereotypes. As Killip himself stated: ‘I wanted to record people’s lives because I valued them. I wanted them to be remembered.’ It is precisely this approach that lends Killip’s work its timelessness, with his images reminding us of the divisions that still exist in Britain.

With almost half its images published here for the very first time, Chris Killip: North is an evocative guide to the photographer’s work across Northeastern England, alongside a selection of images from Ireland and the Isle of Man. Edited by Mark Holborn and produced with exclusive access to Killip’s archive, this is an essential publication for not just Killip’s many fans, but for all those interested in the social power of photography. As Holborn notes, ‘we live in a world as fractured as that Killip witnessed forty or fifty years ago. Our consciousness is stalked by the fury of our divisions.’