most influenced Killip by his own admission. Second, many of those same – and others – immersed themselves in the community to gain the confidence and better understand the subject of their work. So, what is it that makes
Killip unique? Positioning Killip against Strand and Evans, there are small details that set Chris apart from these influencers.
One detail is Killip did not stage his photographs, as did Strand – particularly at the end of his career as he became introduced and influenced by the work of Cezanne. Chris instead “situated” his subjects, by which he would get them somewhat in position and then engage with them to set them at ease before taking multiple pictures through his trigger snap. In this sense, we can understand how – particularly in the case of the photos taken on Isle of Man – that Killip’s portraits contain a similar romanticism to those of Strand.
That is, in many respects, the nature of portraiture: being so focused on a person’s face or posture may well reveal their essence, but it also turns that person into a character type – the innocent child, the matronly housewife, the grizzled laborer. This could be said not only of Strand’s portraits but of Evan’s. And in that sense, Chris’ criticism of Strand’s Mexican Portfolio – that it was seemed ‘patronizing as it’s so much about the beauty of poverty’ – makes sense.
The second detail is – though they shared similar types of commissions and interests, Evans being commissioned by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to document the Great Depression and Killip being commissioned first by The Arts Council of Great Britain to photographs northeastern villages undergoing de-industrialization – Killip did not
capture time in the same way as Evans. Evans was known for taking photos of people and places in motion, documenting in a moment if you will the emergence of industrial capitalism and laborers. Through his work on the vernacular – described as the indigenous expressions of a people found in roadside stands, cheap cafés, advertisements, simple bedrooms, and small-town main streets – art historians argue Evans created ‘an encyclopedic visual catalogue of modern America in the making (my emphasis).’11
What differentiates Killip is his later photos involving the deindustrialization of Britain do not simply capture an element of time, but the relations within time: pictures of children playing, families walking, a young couple standing opposite an elderly couple at a bus stop, farmers vying against one another at auction. These photos provide the context out of which the image arose, as they tell tales of the past and future. Equally, as opposed to the photos taken on Isle of Man, these photos no longer present character types. The photos instead become representatives of time, of an individual’s place in time, of the nature of time itself – of the moment ‘alive,’ in which people experience and express what it’s like to live ‘in time.’ As Chris said: “History is what’s written, my pictures are what happened.”12 And in contrast to Evans, Killip’s photos catalogued
In the elemental environment of people and place, Killip captured the hard work that takes place in the sea as men shovel coal or steer a horse-driven cart filled with coal in the swirl.
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