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‘When I was making my shipbuilding photographs I didn’t show them to anyone, as shipbuilding on Tyneside had become a personal obsession,’ writes Chris Killip. ‘I made them with a sense of urgency as I though it wasn’t going to last. I didn’t set out to be the photographer of the English de-industrial revolution, it happened all around me during the time I was photographing.’
The shipbuilding died slowly, coming to a complete end in 2006, but the pictures Killip made from 1975 to 1977 remain – and have just been published as part of a set of four newspapers by Ponybox.
The pictures Killip made of these ships are epic in grandeur and scale, starting with images of steel hulls rising in the Swan Hunter shipyard over stone walls with the terraced houses of Wallsend in the foreground. As ever with Killip, the lean towards an industrial sublime is tempered by human touches; a woman stepping out of the house in her fluffy slippers, a boy standing on a chopper to get a closer look at the ships.
A frame of scaffolding wraps around the hull of one ship in South Shields, providing both a sense of the scale of these ships, but also taking you into a different era, one where Britain actually built something. Here, the shipbuilding is stripped down to something basic, almost biblical in the simplicity of its construction.
These are pictures from a different era, but they have a humanity about them that transcends the time they were made. The ships are never abstract entities, their mass is always set against land, against the terraced houses that by the end, as the shipyards have closed, have been demolished. And with those closures, those demolitions, there is a betrayal of a population that has never quite recovered.
These images are from the 1970s but the message of globalised manufacturing, cheapened labour, the disposability of a community, and marginal citizenship could be from the present day. That contemporary relevance is given added weight by the design and printing. Newsprint can have a cheap, disposable quality, and that can be used to its advantage. But it’s not the case here. Printed on a slightly grey paper to give added luminosity, the pictures have both a wide tonal range and a depth that brings the images out of the page. And size matters here. The images are huge, printed on black with Niall Sweeney’s graphics providing a modernist nod to the historical economic and metaphorical power of steel.
The combination of the human, the quiet personal moments that you see in The Last Ships, is most apparent in Skinningrove. This features images made between 1981 and ’84 in a small fishing village facing the North Sea. ‘Like a lot of tight-knit fishing communities it could be hostile to strangers, especially one with a camera’, writes Killip, but he found an entry point, a man called ‘Leso’ who would tell anyone who questioned Killip that ‘he’s ok’. And so he photographed.
The pictures are immersive vignettes of everyday life in a village where land and sea merged into one, where the struggle to survive is etched into the land, the sea, and the villagers’ efforts to live in and off both. There are fishing boats coming into shore, the skipper smoking a cigarette, wispy hair blowing over his head as it is tractored on to its trailer. People hang out and listen to music and boats are prepared, there are dogs, cars and carts filled with crabs as a mother sits on the dusty road by the pram and a man stands legs-apart looking out to sea.
Skinningrove is populated by punks, by men who fish and fix nets, by girls on swings and a boy called Simon Coultos who is pictured, all dressed up in his Sunday best, ‘being taken to sea for the first time since his father died.’
At the back of the paper, Killip writes, ‘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?
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Remembering: Richard Noble (18) and David Coultas (34) drowned off Skinningrove on March 31 1984 Leslie Holliday – ‘Leso’ (26) and David Hinton (12) drowned off Skinningrove on July 29 1986
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The deaths Killip foretold are not just of those fishermen who drowned in the North Sea, but also of a way of life and a way of being that seems almost pre-Industrial in parts. The people he photographs are of the land, and are photographed formally but with a certain dynamism that is expressed through body or hand, a dynamism that is directly linked to the immersive nature of his practice. You can see this in his Portraits newspaper, in images of Boo and his rabbit on the Seacoal Beach at Lynemouth, or in his famous picture of a skinhead in Jarrow.
They are not still images. They are quietly made, but have an energy that lives beyond the moment; the turns of the mouth, the looseness of the cheek, the drop of the head are expressions of a real self. They are pictures where the camera is, in true Victorian fashion, an evidential recorder of the physiognomic and bodily self.
Killip’s pictures have a life and an energy that go beyond the surface of the image. There’s no conceit in them, no generic framing or posing, they are pictures where the camera seems to dip into the flow. This is especially the case with The Station. This is a series of images made at a punk club in Gateshead in 1985.. “Nobody ever asked me where I was from or even who I was,” he writes. “A thirty-nine years old with cropped white hair, always wearing a suit (as the jacket had pockets stitched inside to hold my 4×5″ slides). I had a big flat-bed plate camera around my neck and a hefty Norman flash with its out-size battery around my waist. I must have looked like something out of a 1950s B-movie or some rather oddball imitation of ‘Weegee the Famous.'”
1985 was a time when punk thrived in a post-punk era. It’s the high Thatcher, high unemployment years, when the Falklands War and the Miner’s Strike had been won, and her record disapproval levels of the early 1980s had evaporated in the face of repeated sell-offs of state assets and the rise of the cult of the financial markets. But this is the north-east and it’s a time of industrial decay and high unemployment – and in terms of regional intensity, Thatcher’s disapproval ratings are at record levels. The people you see in The Station are part of that world and these are rituals of rebellion. They seek escapism in Friday nights in the mosh pit. Killip shows kids with faces knotted in the concentration to escape, lost in the music and the sweat and the energy.
People will for the most part ignore the camera, shaven heads and mohicans vying for space on the dancefloor. But then you see a pair of goofy, smiling toons flicking Killip the Vs, or a bubble permed youth scowls into the camera. The paper ends with a mohicaned kid snarling with the music, hand made into a fist, his body twisted away from the camera, a roar for his world, a roar against another.
Common threads run through these four newspapers. They contain images that connect to the past, and tie to the future, work that is a visual commentary on industry, housing, lost ways living and earning a wage, and the struggle to survive in the face of that. In that sense it’s a reading on masculinity, on subcultures, on the social and economic desolation inflicted on the North then, on everywhere now.
That’s one thread. More important is the emotional narrative of who these people are and how they live; with passion, with sorrow, with exhaustion, frustration, and pleasure and doubt. It’s a tremendously impressive series of publications, a set that (In Flagrante notwithstanding) defines the most important work of Chris Killip’s career.
– reviewed for Photomonitor by Colin Pantall
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Chris Killip’s four publications have been designed as a limited slipcase edition of 250, signed and numbered, published by and available from Ponybox.
