British industrial capitalism as it was dying.
Why Killip?
Dignify chose to present the work of Chris Killip for two reasons: first, his life represents a commitment to documenting the dignified way in which people lived or tried to live during the difficult time of deindustrialization in the United Kingdom; and second, he did so while holding political beliefs that did not get in the way of his being objective – in fact, made his perspective even stronger.
No doubt Chris was political, as evidenced in this interchange wih Michael Almereya:
Michael Almereya (MA): Your work often has a political undercurrent – if not an explicit acknowledgment of the political situation.
Chris Killip (CK): Well, it would, wouldn't it? I mean, I was living in the industrial community of Newcastle, starting in the mid-1970s. I remember the editor of the Saturday magazine of the Sunday Telegraph asking me to photograph the men from the miners’ strike. I didn't want to do the story for them because it is such a right-wing newspaper. He asked me
which side was I on? I was quite shocked by the question. It had never occurred to me that I could be on anything other than the side I was on!
MA: But including political elements in your work is not about picking sides; it’s about openly saying that your work, your worldview, is conditioned by historical forces.
CK: It was natural. I had no wish to deny it. I was also influenced by John Berger's TV program Ways of Seeing. I was so excited by that. I was just trying to understand then that no matter what you did, you inevitably had a political position. How declared it was was up to you, but it was going to be inherent in the work, and it was something you should think about as a maker. I never worried about my position in the art world. I thought time and history would ultimately judge me, that my job was to get on with it, to make the work and to make it wholeheartedly from what had informed me.13
Moreover, by chronicling the end of the industrial era, Killip serves to provide a bookend to a period of industrial capitalism whose start was first chronicled by Strand and Evans in the United States at the beginning of the 20th
Right:
MPF Sofa Sessions / Chris Killip in conversation with Martin Parr. Filmed and edited by Alex Parkyn-Smith. Courtesy of Martin Parr Foundation.
Courtesy of:
Martin Parr Foundation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjfrZ7JbH7Q
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