Chris Killip spent months living in deindustrialised communities in North-East England, photographing some of the most intimate images of 1970s and '80s Britain – using a huge camera that was never built for the job

Black and white photograph of children playing on a rope swing wedged between two brick walls, with two more boys crouched nearby covering their faces, taken in Byker, Tyneside, in 1976.

Ask most photographers today what you need for unguarded, intimate documentary work and they'll say something small, quiet and fast. A rangefinder, a compact, anything you can raise and lower before a subject has time to arrange their face.

To say that Chris Killip went in a different direction would be something of an understatement. He mainly used a large-format field camera on a tripod, the sort of set-up that takes a minute or more to compose, focus and load before you can even think about pressing the shutter.