Martin Parr: You have said before that you would never re-do In Flagrante. What made you change your mind?

You’re going to get a picture by being there. It’s never easy. Sometimes you’re good and they’re good…I’d never seen them before and I never saw them again.” —Chris Killip In 1991 Killip was invited to be a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University. In 1994 he was made a tenured professor and was department chair from 1994-98. He retired from Harvard in December 2017 and continued to live in Cambridge, MA, USA, until his death in October, 2020. We’re discussing his work in England’sNorth East from 1973-1985, images from which made up his seminal photobook In Flagrante. Released in 1988 and showing communities reeling from the effects of de-industrialisation, it was immediately hailed as a classic – and read as a statement against Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister most identified with the process of de-industrialisation. In fact Killip has long been at pains to reject that reading, pointing out in In Flagrante Two, published in 2016, that he actually shot his images under four Prime Ministers, “Edward Heath, Conservative (1970-1974), Harold Wilson, Labour (1974-1976), James Callaghan, Labour (1976-1979), Margaret Thatcher, Conservative (1979-1990)”.

1946–2020

I worry about the digital camera. I tell my students to turn off the screen, and they don’t. They think I’m crazy. I’m not crazy. I know what made my pictures better was the anxiety I had, because I didn’t know what I’d just taken. I couldn’t see it, and I always thought it wasn’t good enough, so I’d push a bit harder. I’d try to make a better picture. Twenty eight years later, In Flagrante is getting its first reprint, courtesy of Steidl. In Flagrante Two, which got its name after Killip made the decision to add two photographs to the original sequence, is, in many ways, a different book – one benefits from three decades of hindsight, says Killip. Chris Killip: It’s certainly perceived as my finest achievement. In Flagrante Two is different. Better? We will have to see what the jury makes of it. I was 42 and living in England when In Flagrante came out and when In Flagrante Two comes out I will be 69 having spent the last 25 years living and teaching in the U.S. Maybe that’s the big difference, 28 years of hindsight. Later, I wanted to get away from this very formal thing and changed my photography, and so I used a plate camera where you had a cape. I had a thumb press, so I’d be looking at you, but you never knew when I was going to take the picture.

I carried that film around like it was gold. Then, when I finally got it developed, I was like, ‘What? What was he thinking?!’” she laughs. “There was no iconic photo I could print and say, ‘This is our wedding.’ It was people talking, people caught biting into food.

The zines in question are a set of four tabloid-sized, unbound newspapers Killip co-published with graphic design studio Pony in 2018. They include The Station, made from a set of photographs shot at a co-operative punk venue in Gateshead in 1985, and Skinningrove, shot in the preceding four years in a small fishing village on the North Yorkshire coast. Born in Douglas on the Isle of Man, Killip worked as freelance commercial photographer in the 1960s, before turning to documentary. In 1975 he was granted a two-year fellowship to photograph in the north-east and the first evidence of how important his images were came in May 1977, when Creative Camera magazine devoted an entire issue to his work in progress.

The images here are included in an exhibition at the Getty Museum, Now Then: Chris Killip and the Making of In Flagrante (May 23–August 13, 2017). There are several single photographs here that have become iconic in the interim: a melee of a melee of skinheads at a miners’ benefit gig by hardcore punk group Angelic Upstarts; a hunched, crow-like figure in a snowstorm; a thin, dark man carrying a child on his shoulders; a scrawny girl playing with a hula hoop on a forlorn beach. Today’s poverty may look different, less Victorian, but you hope that someone with as keen an eye and as acute an understanding of visual narrative as Chris Killip is capturing it. I somehow doubt it. Since its publication in 1988, Chris Killip’s In Flagrante has been hailed as a masterpiece of photojournalism – a book that not only influenced many of Killip’s contemporaries but also came to be defined, wrongly, says the photographer, as a savage criticism of Margaret Thatcher’s years as U.K.’s Prime Minister.

Tracy Marshall Grant used a picture edit he had already worked out when she co-edited the book, Chris Killip, published by Thames & Hudson last October. Killip also shepherded the retrospective of his work on show at The Photographers’ Gallery, London (co-curated by Marshall Grant, alongside her partner, Ken Grant, both long term friends of Killip).