Chris Killip - Chris Killip & Pirelli Work - 2015-2022

You're bidding on two books by Chris Killip (1946-2020), one of the UK’s most important and influential post-war documentary photographers.

Chris Killip – Chris Killip
Publisher: Thames & Hudson, 2022
Hardcover, 256 pages, English
Size: 24.5×30.5cm
New in seal

Grounded in sustained immersion and participation in the communities he photographed, Chris Killip’s keenly observed work chronicled ordinary people’s lives in stark, yet sympathetic, detail. His photographs are recognized as some of the most important visual records of 1980s Britain; as editor of this book Ken Grant reflects, they tell the story of those who ‘had history “done to them”, who felt its malicious disregard and yet, like the photographer with whom they shared so much of their lives, refused to yield or look away.’

Published to coincide with the first full retrospective of Killip’s life and work at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, this book, designed by Niall Sweeney & Nigel Truswell at Pony Ltd, presents photographs from each of his major series alongside lesser-known works. It includes a foreword by Brett Rogers, in-depth essays by Ken Grant tracing Killip’s life and career, and texts by Gregory Halpern, Amanda Maddox and Lynsey Hanley.

Chris Killip – Pirelli Work
Publisher: Steidl, 2015
Hardcover, 88 pages
Size: 26x28cm
New in seal

“I wanted to show the manufacturing process as clearly as I could, and to do so in this factory meant it would have to be lit. Ironically, my stubbornness in trying to avoid lighting would now have its own unexpected rewards. Because of the desperate amount of time that I had spent there, I knew in a visual way the processes of the factory; the rhythms and cycles of the machines, the movement and steps that the operators had to take, the movement that the processes predetermined for them. I began again, re-photographing the factory using lights, sometimes three or four lights triggered by remote control devices. The main light, which was the one balanced to light the subject, was often held on a pole by my friend, away from the camera, mimicking the fashion techniques that I knew from my past. I now understood and knew what I wanted to do. The workplace had become, in a real sense for me, a theater and I embraced the look of these new photographs with their relation to fashion, film noir, and even Soviet realism. For me this ‘look’ seemed a more telling way to record and document this enforced ritual.”
Chris Killip