The existential and the political: anthropology and Chris Killip

Cover picture credits: Chris Killip, Helen and her Hula-hoop, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth, Northumberland, 1984

By Iacopo Nassigh

The first retrospective exhibition on the work of Chris Killip (1946-2020), a Manx photographer who has mainly worked in the North of England terminated just one week ago at the Photographers gallery, Soho. Killip’s work expresses a disenchanted gaze on the life Northerners throughout the 70s and 80s, during which the closing of factories and mines left many people without a job. However, Killip’s photographic gaze is not trying to romanticise the resistance of those who remained in the North. His photography is embedded into a deep awareness of the need of solidarity and amplification of these people’s lives, and not of pity for these marginalised groups. With this awareness, Killip spent months and years with the communities he photographed, such as the years he spent in Lynemouth, Northumberland in the early 80s staying in his van among a community of workers in an open-air coal mine by the sea.

Chris Killip, Gateshead [punks], 1986

Even if sharing the same basic experience of an anthropologist doing prolonged fieldwork it seems to me that his poetic eye was seeing something quite different from what an anthropologist normally sees. Where anthropologists see resistance to structural oppression Killip was able to see the human capacity to find relief in despair, to enjoy life as it comes despite the world burning around. His image of a girl playing with a hula hoop or the pictures he took of young punk man going crazy at a rave speak not just of people that find meaning in cultural structures, as old Geertz would put it, but people that actually enjoy themselves without caring much for a while about anything else. This existential quality of Killip’s photography is what I will carry with me other than an even stronger conviction now that things are not just suspended in cultural or political structures. Instead, if one has the eye to see this and suspend disbelief for a second, things can be appreciated for themselves, as moments of emotional explosion that maybe just a photograph can express.