Encounter Chris Killip
This talk, organised in connection with the exhibition Chris Killip. Trabajo/Work, is a unique opportunity to learn about the work of one of today's most important documentary photographers. The artist himself leads the visit through the exhibition, in which his photography is shown as a real and poetic document of the living conditions of the British working class, within the tradition of direct photography.
The work of Chris Killip depicts the dismantling of the European industrial world during the second half of the 20th century, underlining the precarious conditions affecting a large part of the working class, seen with particular harshness in the 1980s. Chris Killip belongs to the generation of photographers who started out in photojournalism or, in the case of Killip, in advertising photography, and then forged an independent path starting in the 1970s, thanks to their engagement with the changes occurring in society and their decisive use of the camera as a political tool. Influenced by photographers such as Lewis Hine and Paul Strand and by the worker-photography movement, Killip recovers the documentary image through long observation of daily life, recorded in books and extensive photographic series.
Chris Killip (Douglas, Isle of Man, 1946) is a photographer and professor at Harvard University's Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES). Since the 1970s he has been documenting Great Britain's industrial past in photographs. In 1977 he helped created the pioneer independent gallery Side Gallery, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and he served as its director for two years. He won the Henri Cartier Bresson Prize in 1989. His work can be found in the permanent collection of museums such as New York City's MoMA, the George Eastman House in Rochester, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.