Background
Christopher David Killip was born 11 July 1946 in Douglas, on Isle of Man, where his parents ran the Highlander Pub, which was described by
Chris in a video interview as a large pub with four separate bars. Killip admitted he was not a good student:
I got kicked out of school on my 16th birthday. I hated school: horrible place. I was very happy to get kicked out. And I never imagined going back..1
Ultimately Chris left school to train as a hotel manager at the finest hotel in town, only to realize in short order being a hotel manager was not his calling.
As Chris said and as others have reported, it was when he was 17 and flipping through Paris Match’s coverage of the Tour de France that he saw Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photograph, Rue-Mouffetard, Paris, of a small boy carrying two bottles of wine. Killip claimed the experience was profound, even though he didn’t understand why or what the photograph meant. All Chris knew, at that moment, photography was to be his calling. When he told his father he intended to become a photographer, Killip’s father pointed out that Chris had never owned a camera or taken a photograph.2
But such minor realities did not deter Chris. He soon found work as a beach photographer in hopes of making enough money to escape Isle of Man. A year later, Killip would be in London working as an assistant to advertising photographer Adrian Flowers. Chris must have had a restless soul, because he would soon leave that position to freelance as a commercial photographer, supplementing his income with short gigs working again in his father’s pub.
It was when visiting New York in 1969 that Killip took in Bill Brandt’s exhibition at the Museum
of Modern Art (MOMA). The exhibition inspired
Chris to visit the museum every day thereafter, looking at and learning from what was displayed and commented upon in the permanent collection. The work of Paul Strand, August Sander, and Walker Evans had the greatest impact on Killip.
Of the three, Killip admitted to being influenced the most by Paul Strand and Walker Evans. Chris spoke to the differences in their work and who became most influential in a 2002 interview with Michael Almereyda for Aperture Magazine. In that interview, Killip indicated he was initially taken with the work of Paul Strand:
Strand was a good image-maker. It’s very ironic that Strand would make something like his Mexican Portfolio [published 1940], which seems patronizing as it’s so much about the beauty of poverty.
Ultimately, Chris found Evans to be more interesting:
It was Evan’s coolness, about surviving McCarthyism, and all the things that Evans survived; and still you knew he had a distinct political position. It was in the work. Evans gave me a great heart about that. He had navigated much more difficult circumstances that I had. In America, he had to live through a much more charged political situation than the liberalism of England. In America, it’s much more of a minefield for people who are not of the Right.3
It was from Strand and Evans (and Sander) that Killip understood photography could be pursued for its own sake; it was because of them that he decided to focus on social documentary photography. He also understood that he could contribute to the arts and build a career by documenting people and places on Isle of Man. Killip then called his father and asked if he could move back to Isle of Man and work in the pub to provide him the money and time to pursue this new direction. Chris’ father said yes; and Killip would never look back.
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