An old man walking between rows of terraced housing and, behind him, the sky erased by the huge bow of a ship being built. A teenager picking coal on a beach. A man manoeuvring his horse and cart around a car dumped by the sea. A young girl playing hula-hoop in a desolate, rubbish-strewn landscape.
Chris Killip and Graham Smith’s photographs, mostly of the north-east of England, in the 1970s and 1980s, the era of deindustrialisation, of smashed communities and broken lives, look like images of a different world. Two exhibitions opened last week in London showcasing their photography, one a retrospective of Killip’s work, the other a recreation of a joint exhibition, Another Country, first shown in 1985. They raise questions both of the nature of photography and of our perceptions of working-class lives.
