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.
Thirty-seven years on, the images are a historical record of a time and a place, but, as gallerist Augusta Edwards points out, they also possess a haunting contemporary resonance. “The work has so much relevance now given that so many communities feel forsaken by their government,” she elaborates. “There is also a tenderness and hopefulness in the work that speaks of the hardships ordinary people face though no choosing of their own.”
Much, though, has changed in the interim, both in terms of the physical and social landscape the pair captured for posterity, and in the fortunes of the two photographers. Killip, who died of lung cancer in October 2020, is now generally recognised as a master of British documentary photography. His 1988 book In Flagrante remains a classic of the genre and, although he all but retreated into academia in 1991, becoming a professor at Harvard, his photographs have been exhibited around the world. A deftly curated and long overdue retrospective of his work has just opened the Photographers Gallery in London, burnishing his already elevated status as perhaps the most acute chronicler of the human cost of what he later called the “de-industrialisation” of the north-east.
Smith’s work is much less well known. His candid portraits of regulars in Middlesbrough pubs like the Commercial and the Zetland often capture intimate tableaux: people, buoyed or dazed by drink, laughing, talking or lost in thought. The exterior shots of collieries and traditional locals seem even more like another country – the not-too-recent past as distant as a fading memory.
In contrast to Killip, Smith is a much more elusive figure, his work revered by those that have heard of him, but almost unknown to the mainstream. Much of this is down to his dramatic decision to withdraw from the photography scene in 1991, and his subsequent refusal to show his work in galleries, or publish it in book form.
As he makes clear in the foreword to the catalogue for 20/20, his self-willed disappearance from public view was precipitated by a wounding encounter with the most vindictive aspects of the British tabloid press. In 1991, his photographs were shown alongside Killip’s in a show at MoMA in New York under a provocative and misleading title, British Photography from the Thatcher Years. In his foreword to the 20/20 catalogue, he writes that “it fuelled a backlash from some Tory newspapers in Britain”.
More wounding still was a scurrilous report that appeared in a popular north-eastern newspaper under the heading Boozers and Losers, misrepresenting the work as voyeuristic and patronising. An accompanying editorial described the photographers as “a couple of smart alecs from Middlesbrough and Newcastle” – Killip was actually from the Isle of Man – and culminated with the suggestion: “Someone should hang THEM on the walls.”
In his essay, Smith recalls that after the article’s publication, “I received a threat of violence from two distant drinking friends prominent in my photographs. Their message, sent by word of mouth, was also on behalf of others who were enraged by what they had read in the papers.”
Unlike Killip, Smith belonged to the community he had photographed. The people who were “defiled” in the article, he writes, “were mostly people from the close community of South Bank, the home town and workplace of my father and his father.”
Apart from a commercial exhibition in Santa Monica, California, in 2008, entitled Three from Britain, in which his work was exhibited alongside Killip’s and Parr’s, Smith has not allowed his pictures to be shown in a gallery until now. His isolation in rural Northumberland seems to have led to a kind of creative reinvention as a writer, with both Edwards and Parr attesting to his skill at recalling the people and places he photographed decades ago.
“It’s fair to say Graham lived a wild life when he was shooting,” says Parr. “He had rough times, drinking, sleeping out. But I think of him as one of the great characters of photography. He’s a bit like Josef Koudelka in that way. Until you sit down with him, and hear the stories, you don’t get it. And, of course, his legend has only grown in his absence.”
Does the 20/20 suggest a tentative reemergence from his long, self-imposed exile from the photography scene? “I wouldn’t go that far,” laughs Parr. Edwards, who initially approached Killip with the idea for the joint show in 2019, thinks not. “Chris was able to persuade Graham after a time,” she says, “but it has taken so long to get to this point. It is a huge thing for Graham that he has allowed this to happen but, in all likelihood, I suspect that it might be the only show he will do for the foreseeable future.”
That possibility, alongside the death of Killip, cannot help but lend the exhibition an almost valedictory feel. It is also, like the original iteration, a celebration of their friendship, their mutual respect and the ways in which their different approaches to documentary interact on the walls of the gallery like a lively visual conversation. In his catalogue essay, though, Smith recalls how he initially refused Killip the use of his newly constructed darkroom when the latter first arrived in Newcastle upon Tyne and introduced himself to the pioneering Amber collective that Smith belonged to. “They were chalk and cheese, temperamentally,” says Parr, “and there could be tension between them, but ultimately they knew what they believed in.”
That, too, resonates in the work, in the two differing approaches to the same end: the recording of ordinary, working-class lives at the mercy of economic and ideological forces that devalued them. Smith describes the Amber collective as “a group of idealists guided by a philosophy to create a dialogue with working-class communities, to value and document their culture, to live cheaply and be in control of our own labour.” That idealism also seems to belong to another time, another country, but it underpinned two bodies of work that have grown in importance as time has passed. Killip could have been speaking for both of them when he said of his subjects, “In recording their lives, I’m valuing their lives.”
20/20: Chris Killip/Graham Smith is at Augusta Edwards, London, until 6 November. Chris Killip, Retrospective is at the Photographers Gallery, London, until 19 February
Three From Britain was staged in 2008, not 2018. This has been corrected.
