In 1985, the Serpentine Gallery in London hosted an exhibition by Chris Killip and Graham Smith entitled Another Country. It comprised about 120 large-format, starkly evocative black-and-white images made in the north-east of England in the late 1970s and early 1980s by the two British photographers during a period of rapid industrial decline. At their insistence, the prints were exhibited without identifying captions so that viewers could not be sure who took what.
“With hindsight, it was a bold and powerful statement by the two great British documentary photographers of the postwar era.” says Martin Parr, who befriended both of them when he lived and worked in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, in the 1970s. This week, a distilled version of the exhibition, titled 20/20, opens at the Augusta Edwards Gallery in London. It comprises 20 prints by each photographer and, once again, they will all be exhibited without identifying captions. Killip’s more familiar photographs were taken in Tyneside, often in the shadows of looming shipyards, while Smith’s were made in his native Middlesbrough, often in pubs frequented by himself.
