Chris Killip. trabajo / work. From October 2, 2013 to February 24, 2014
Chris Killip: photographs inevitably have a relationship with history. When you've taken a photograph you can send that moment to the past.
And there's something fantastic, in (that) looking, in the stillness of this image which is frozen from the past. And when you make a book of photographs or make an exhibition there' s a dialogue between these pictures. So you can say things which I think are quite eloquent but without words. And so that's quite an interesting proposition and an interesting dialogue between you and all sort of viewers... people you don't know. And people come to photography willingly. They don't feel that they don't understand it, they don't think about that, they know how to deal with visual imagery in that sense. So they come immediately into it and can partake with it.
There's the picture of the boy that you have outside, of the boy on the wall and that picture is regarded as the great description of the Thatcher years. And it's quite strange because she wasn't prime minister when I took that photograph. There's another 3 years to come before she becomes prime minister. So that image and that time have nothing to do with her in the real sense. It was a labour prime minister, James Callaghan, who was in power when I made that photograph, So it's quite complicated how your photographs elude you; they go away and this journalistic simplifications become repeated, and become then the way the people understand the image and the way they pigeonholed.
For me the North was pretty tough on the labour and it just got tougher on the conservatives. Neither were fantastic for the ordinary people, no... No, it's the way of life and politics, and then there's the whole sort of... the economic realities. And so ultimately in many ways for most people there's not that much difference ultimately between the political parties, particularly when you're trying to bring work into an area like the north of England.
Well I has become very tied up with the idea of Thatcher, Thatcher's Britain. but the reality is much more complicated than that because it covers a much bigger time period. It's a simplification to just regard it as an illustration of Thatcher's Britain. For me it is a document, among other things, about the de-industrialization of Britain. But when I was taking the pictures I didn't know that. I didn't know that all this was going to go so quickly. You knew maybe that this was not going be the same for the next 50 years, but I had no idea that in five years things would have gone. The chip would have gone. And that in ten years there would be no coal mines. I didn't know that; and I don't think anybody at that time knew that it would be so overwhelming, you know, so complete. So it is now this... I think I am the photographer of the de-industrialization of Britain. It's very strange for me to go back where they collected coal from the sea, cause when I first saw this place I looked and I saw the men on the beach collecting coal from the sea with horses and carts. So if you stood there now you would have no idea what this place was like 15 years before. It's disappeared. So I m very glad when I photographed it. You can say "no, look, this existed, this is what this place was like". So there's a strange evidential power, particularly for the children of these areas and the children of the people who worked there. Yes, "this happened this was ours then. It was different then than now". So for me this is important. This evidence is there, concrete, its evidence.
It's like how crazy life is. I came back from Essen and there was a film maker friend who was teaching at Harvard. And he asked me what did I do there. And I explained about the other show, and I sort of gave him a talk. He said "What do you talk about ?". I said "I talk about my work". And he said "Well, do it for me now". So I gave him... sitting in my classroom I did the talk that I did in Essen. And he said "I will film it" , so I said "seriously?". "Yes, a week tonight, five o'clock". And then he turned up a week later with two students, and they were camera people and he made a film of my talk, and then I sent him digital files so you could replace the slide images with the digital files, so it's high quality. Then he came back to me and said "listen, I think I'm going to take out one section on the fishing village cause I can work on that to see how I can treat the film, what I will do with it". So he took out the section on Skinningrove, which is 15 minutes long, and he made an edit and a treatment of that and with a dialogue about what he was doing. Then he finished and then he didn't say anything to me and then he sent it off to the Sundance film festival but he didn't tell me and then and I found it had won the prize for the best short documentary... which is very strange. cause this was a very casual thing. But he was a very well-known filmmaker, Mike Almereyda, so I think they gave the prize because of him. But anyway because it won that, it automatically goes to the Oscars, cause the winner of the Sundance short documentary goes to Hollywood in the class for the short documentary films. I don't think it will win but I think it's quite funny that this sort of funny dialogue in my classroom ends up with another life of its own.
