Chris Killip’s photographs are silvery glimpses of bygone northern life

Chris Killip’s portrayals of working-class life in the 1970s and 1980s have become classics of British documentary photography. He spent 15 years living in and photographing communities in the north-east of England, producing images that were the result of well-forged relationships and intimate knowledge of place. They match complex representations of a political era with a mythological, almost timeless, quality to the scenes suspended in gelatin silver.

Take “Cookie in the snow” (1984), on display at the Photographers’ Gallery in London. Shot on a large-format camera, we see distant smokestacks, a makeshift camp and a caped man trudging through a snowy landscape with a bucket and heavy canvas bag. His body is contorted and his face hidden, with the viewer a few paces ahead of him: close enough to share in his plight yet far enough away to contemplate the strange anachronism of the scene.

The exhibition is the first major full-career retrospective of Killip’s work, and it focuses on his deeply embedded documentary practice. It took Killip eight years to gain access to a group of transient sea-coal harvesters in Lynemouth, Northumberland, the series that includes “Cookie in the snow”. The pictures are among the most memorable of the exhibition: men scavenge for coal and drive horse-drawn carts through crashing waves, an evocative symbol of the region’s declining coal industry. Killip captures coy smiles, anxious looks, children playing on the rocks and the striking picture of “Moira hand-picking in the very good fur coat”.

Elsewhere, Killip’s photos are humorous and soft in a way that belies the stark black and white: a man with false teeth watching a parade; half-eaten sandwiches and cakes left out after a royal wedding street party; crabs piled in a pushcart beside a baby’s carriage. Thatcherite policies and economic decline bind the compositions, but they never overwhelm the work. Decades on, Killip’s photos tell a complicated story of resilience, drudgery and life in flux.

Killip’s prints are also on display at Augusta Edwards Fine Art, hanging next to the work of Graham Smith — another stalwart of British documentary photography. They share a fondness for titling: “Brian at the disputed fence” and “Glue sniffers” turn Killip’s work into momentary fables. Smith’s titles are just as shrewd: an old man sits amid crumbling institutional decor in a work titled “Thirty Eight Bastard Years on the Furnace Front, Furnace Keeper, Mess Room for No 4 and No 5 Furnaces”.

But where Smith’s work is about small worlds — the private, claustrophobic spaces of pubs, homes and tight street scenes — Killip’s work is concerned with the expanse of sea, crowds and open air. On display at Augusta Edwards is his phenomenal “Coalmine and housing” (1976), a delicately composed photo of an infant peering out intently from behind lace curtains in a house sat squarely next to a colliery. Splitting the middle of the scene is a well-worn path running into the smog. There’s an unguarded intimacy to the depiction of banality and childhood wonder in an industrial town.

The achievement of these photos comes from the way Killip’s quiet attachment to the north of England elevates the images beyond simple archival document. Yet they still carry a sense of loss. Smith gave up photography in the 1990s, frustrated by newspaper reviewers’ sneering descriptions of the working-class subjects featured in his work. That he organised the exhibition with his friend Killip before the latter’s death in 2020 gives an understated poignancy to the work.

‘Chris Killip’ runs at The Photographers’ Gallery to February 19 2023, thephotographersgallery.org.uk. ‘Chris Killip/Graham Smith’ runs at Augusta Edwards Fine Art to November 6, augustaedwards.com

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