Curator: The exhibition is curated by Kara Felt, assistant curator of art at the Denver Botanic Gardens and a former Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, with the organisational assistance of Diane Waggoner, Curator of Photographs, National Gallery of Art.
Gilles Peress (French, b. 1946) NORTHERN IRELAND. Belfast. Summer evening
1989
Gelatin silver print
Corcoran Collection
Museum Purchase with funds donated by the Marlin Miller, Jr. Family Foundation and by exchange: John Bryant and Patricia Bauman
I lived through these years in Britain.
Strikes, unemployment, high inflation and economic failure
New Right, monetarist ideas and the free market economy
The Troubles
The Winter of Discontent
The queens silver jubilee
Glam Rock, punk and then New Romantics; disco and then HiNRG
Aston Martin, Triumph TR7, two door Capri and MGB GT
Falklands War
Charles and Diana
1984-1985 miners’ strike
Recession
North-South divide
Gay Liberation, women’s liberation
Clause 28
HIV/AIDS
Brixton Riots (September 1985)
Racism and the National Front
Victorian values and moral behaviour vs the permissive society
and Margaret Thatcher
That one name still sends shivers down my spine.
The photographs in this posting capture the grittiness of those years… and the surreality of the lived experience. From my perspective, I worked really hard and partied even harder at clubs such as Scandals, Adams, Bang and Heaven. I spent as much as I earnt and careered around London in my beloved Mini 1275 GT as fast as I could, listening to David Bowie, Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra, Pink Floyd, and the inimitable Grace Jones.
In black and white, Graham Smith’s Bennetts Corner (Giro Corner), the Erimus Club and Commercial Pub, South Bank, Middlesbrough (1982, below) perfectly encapsulates the depressive, dank mood of the country during these years. The meaning of “Giro corner” in the title references a place where people would go, in this case two pubs, to spend their Giro cheque: an unemployment or income support payment by giro cheque, posted fortnightly.
In colour, Martin Parr’s two photographs of New Brighton, Merseyside(1984, below) reference the absurdity of the British at play: leisure time in “new” Brighton on Mersyside in North West England (many miles from the affluent Brighton on the south coast of England) – eating surrounded by rubbish and relaxing on a hard concrete ramp with crying baby, while other artists capture the isolation of individuals, their working class lives and middle class pretensions.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Profound changes in British society in the 1970s and 1980s inspired a revolution in British photography. This Is Britain highlights the socially conscious photographers who captured this moment in time, among them Vanley Burke, Pogus Caesar, Anna Fox, Paul Graham, Sunil Gupta, Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, and Martin Parr. The exhibition features some 45 newly acquired prints in the National Gallery of Art’s collection. It brings together works by photographers who explored the national identity as Britain grappled with deindustrialisation, uprisings in inner cities, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the controversial policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The exhibition also includes Handsworth Songs (1986, below), a 59-minute film on the uprisings that rocked London and Birmingham in 1985. It was produced by the Black Audio Film Collective and directed by John Akomfrah. The exhibition is organised by the National Gallery of Art.
Text from the National Gallery of Art website
Anna Fox (British, b. 1961) Advertising Agency, Docklands Enterprise Zone
1988
From the series Work Stations
Chromogenic print Image (visible): 44.5 x 54.8 cm (17 1/2 x 21 9/16 in.) Framed: 68.5 x 83.8 cm (26 15/16 x 33 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Anna Fox (British, b. 1961) Conference and Exhibitions Organiser, Euston. Personal Assistant to the Director
1988, printed later
From the series Work Stations
Chromogenic print Image (visible): 44.5 x 54.8cm (17 1/2 x 21 9/16 in.) Framed: 68.5 x 83.8cm (26 15/16 x 33 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Anna Fox (British, b. 1961) Cafe, the City. Salesperson
1988
From the series Work Stations
Chromogenic print Image (visible): 44.5 x 54.8cm (17 1/2 x 21 9/16 in.) Framed: 68.5 x 83.8cm (26 15/16 x 33 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Britain experienced profound changes in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was racked by deindustrialization, urban uprisings, the controversial policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Photography became a central form of creative expression during this period, supported and disseminated through new schools, galleries, artists’ collectives, magazines, and government funding.
This Is Britain brings together the work of a generation of photographers who were commenting on the deep unrest of these pivotal decades. Vanley Burke, Pogus Caesar, Anna Fox, Paul Graham, Sunil Gupta, Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Martin Parr, and others pictured communities, traditions, and landscapes affected by Britain’s shifting social and economic realities. Together, they photographed a nation redefining what it meant to be British and, ultimately, modern.
Text from the National Gallery of Art website
Profound changes in British society in the 1970s and 1980s inspired a revolution in British photography. This Is Britain: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s highlights the work of socially conscious photographers who captured this period of unrest. The exhibition features some 45 newly acquired prints by Vanley Burke, Pogus Caesar, Anna Fox, Paul Graham, Sunil Gupta, Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Martin Parr, and others. It brings together photographers who examined national identity as Britain grappled with deindustrialisation, uprisings in inner cities, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the sometimes controversial policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. On view on the Ground Floor of the National Gallery’s West Building from January 29 through June 11, 2023, the exhibition also features the film Handsworth Songs (1986). The 59-minute film, produced by the Black Audio Film Collective and directed by John Akomfrah, explores uprisings in London and Birmingham in 1985. Reece Auguiste, a member of the Black Audio Film Collective, is the guest curator for an accompanying film program.
Beginning in the 1970s, photography gained its contemporary prominence in Britain, with a rapidly expanding network of galleries, artists’ collectives, schools, and magazines dedicated to promoting the medium. Immigrants and artists of colour, reflecting Britain’s growing multiculturalism, introduced fresh perspectives, as did the many women who entered the field. A generation of young photographers moved from largely black-and-white, documentary styles to more conceptual and often humorous projects in colour in the 1980s. As photographers forged new directions, they pictured a country redefining what it meant to be British and, ultimately, modern.
“This Is Britain tells history on an intimate scale, highlighting stories we may have otherwise missed. The addition of these photographs to the National Gallery’s collection allows us to reflect on two decades of artistic innovation and celebrate the talented, diverse group of creators who captured them. We hope that this exhibition inspires visitors, as they contemplate some of the highs and lows experienced by British citizens in the ’70s and ’80s,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art.
Exhibition overview
This Is Britain: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s focuses on the work of photographers who recorded ways of life that were under threat or disappearing in those tumultuous decades. John Davies’s expansive view of Agecroft Power Station, Salford (1983) emphasises the displacement of industrial structures. Paul Graham’s elegiac series A1: The Great North Road (1982) examines the shift away from the A1 – a major thoroughfare from London to Edinburgh – to the newer, more direct M1 motorway, resulting in businesses along the former highway to suffer. With their forlorn colours and barren spaces, his pictures challenged the expectation that photography on social themes should be in black and white. Reflecting Britain’s growing immigration and multiculturalism during this period of modernisation, Vanley Burke’s Boy with Flag, Winford in Handsworth Park (1970) pictures a Black youth proudly displaying the Union Jack from his bike.
Many artists in the 1980s continued exploring colour photography, using intense hues inspired by advertising to poke fun at the rise of leisure activities, consumerism, and corporate greed. The series The Last Resort (1983-1986) by Martin Parr, arguably Britain’s most influential living photographer, surveys seaside tourists in New Brighton with acerbic wit. Chris Steele-Perkins’s decade-long project The Pleasure Principle (1980-1989) captures Margaret Thatcher’s England through surreal images, such as Hypnosis Demonstration, Cambridge University Ball. Six photographs from Anna Fox’s Work Stations (1987-1988) signal the competition and stress of London office life in the late 1980s. Sunil Gupta strikes a more polemical tone in his series “Pretended” Family Relationships (1988) by responding to Thatcher’s policy prohibiting the promotion of gay and lesbian lifestyles.
The final room presents Handsworth Songs (1986, 59 minutes), a landmark nonfiction film that connects the civil unrest in London and the Handsworth section of Birmingham in 1985 with Britain’s colonial past, weaving contemporary reports and interviews with historical footage and photographs. The film, produced by the Black Audio Film Collective and directed by the acclaimed filmmaker John Akomfrah, features a soundtrack that mixes reggae and post-punk with industrial noises and voiceovers.
Press release from the National Gallery of Art, Washington
Punk Rock, record unemployment, urban uprisings, Margaret Thatcher, the Troubles in Northern Ireland: profound changes shook British society and inspired a revolution in photography in the 1970s and 1980s. A generation of young photographers used their cameras to comment on the deep unrest of these pivotal decades. With a keen eye for social critique and a spirit of rebellion, they photographed a country redefining what it meant to be British and, ultimately, modern.
Photography during this period became a central form of creative expression, fuelled by a rapidly expanding network of galleries, museum departments, artists’ collectives, schools, and magazines dedicated to the medium. Immigrants and artists of colour, reflecting the nation’s growing multiculturalism, introduced new perspectives, as did the many women who entered the field.
Moving from largely black-and-white, documentary styles toward more conceptual projects in colour, photographers adopted new strategies to examine national identity. In the face of severe economic dislocation, widespread civil disorder, and Prime Minister Thatcher’s controversial policies, these artists declared: This is Britain.
Documenting the Deindustrial Revolution
The decline of British heavy industry in the 1970s led to labor disputes and high unemployment in the early 1980s. As the country prioritised modern technologies and greater efficiency, photographers recorded the communities, structures, and ways of life that were under threat or disappearing. Graham Smith and Vanley Burke portrayed people they had known for decades, while Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, and Gilles Peress undertook long-term projects to create intimate yet often bleak photographs of life on the margins of society. Paul Graham and John Davies explored England’s uneasy embrace of the future by showing the people and places being left behind. While these photographers held no real hope of inspiring change, they shared an earnest concern for who and what was being lost as the nation modernised.
Picturing Absurdity in the Thatcher Years
As the leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 and as prime minister from 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher was a polarising figure in Britain. She oversaw the development of an American-style free market economy, the resurgence of British nationalism, and major cutbacks to public spending (famously declaring that “there is no such thing” as society). During the Thatcher years, photographers Martin Parr and Anna Fox used the brash colours of advertising to poke fun at the rise of leisure activities, consumerism, and corporate greed. Combining text and image, Karen Knorr and Sunil Gupta considered how traditional English institutions sidelined women, people of colour, and gay and lesbian communities. Their works openly satirise long-held traditions and question emerging values in British society.
Wall text from the exhibition
Tony Ray-Jones (English, 1941-1972) Butlin’s Holiday Camp, Scarborough
1968
Gelatin silver print Image: 15.8 x 24.8cm (6 1/4 x 9 3/4 in.) Sheet: 35.8 x 28cm (14 1/8 x 11 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Karen Knorr (American born Germany, b. 1954) A mood of Highly Coloured Naturalism
1983
From the series Country Life
Gelatin silver print mounted on board Image: 40.2 x 40.9cm (15 13/16 x 16 1/8 in.) Sheet: 60.7 x 51cm (23 7/8 x 20 1/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Karen Knorr (American born Germany, b. 1954) Newspapers are no longer ironed, Coins no longer boiled So far have Standards Fallen
1981-1983, printed 2015
From the series Gentlemen
Gelatin silver print Image: 40.6 × 40.5cm (16 × 15 15/16 in.) Sheet: 61.5 × 50.7cm (24 3/16 × 19 15/16 in.) Mat: 71 × 55.8cm (27 15/16 × 21 15/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Karen Knorr (American born Germany, b. 1954) We owe it to the Free world not to Allow Brutal Forces to succeed. When the Rule of law Breaks down, the World takes a further Step towards Chaos
1981-1983, printed 2015
From the series Gentlemen
Gelatin silver print Image: 40.5 x 40.7cm (15 15/16 x 16 in.) Sheet: 60.8 x 50.5cm (23 15/16 x 19 7/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Chris Killip (Isle of Man, 1946-2020) Margaret, Rosie, and Val, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, Northumberland
1983
Gelatin silver print Image: 40.5 x 50.5cm (15 15/16 x 19 7/8 in.) Sheet: 47.8 x 57.6cm (18 13/16 x 22 11/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Colin Jones (English, 1936-2021) The Black House, London
1973-1976
Gelatin silver print Image: 33.8 x 49.1cm (13 5/16 x 19 5/16 in.) Sheet: 41 x 50.8cm (16 1/8 x 20 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Vanley Burke (British born Jamaica, b. 1951) Young Men on See-Saw, Handsworth Park, Birmingham
1984, printed 2021
Gelatin silver print Image: 30.1 x 45.4cm (11 7/8 x 17 7/8 in.) Sheet: 40.4 x 50.5cm (15 7/8 x 19 7/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Vanley Burke (British born Jamaica, b. 1951) Boy with Flag, Winford in Handsworth Park
1970, printed 2022
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen (Finland, b. 1948) Young Couple in a Backyard on a Summer’s Day
1975, printed 2012
Gelatin silver print Image: 36.1 × 39.3cm (14 3/16 × 15 1/2 in.) Sheet: 40.4 × 50.5cm (15 7/8 × 19 7/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund Courtesy L. Parker Stephenson Photographs
John Davies (British, b. 1949) Agecroft Power Station, Salford
1983
Gelatin silver print Image: 37.6 × 56.1cm (14 13/16 × 22 1/16 in.) Sheet: 50.5 × 60.4cm (19 7/8 × 23 3/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund Courtesy L. Parker Stephenson Photographs
Graham Smith (British, b. 1947) Bennetts Corner (Giro Corner), the Erimus Club and Commercial Pub, South Bank, Middlesbrough
1982, printed 2008
Gelatin silver print Image: 37.4 x 47cm (14 3/4 x 18 1/2 in.) Sheet: 47.7 x 57.4cm (18 3/4 x 22 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Paul Graham (British, b. 1956) Café Assistants, Compass Café, Colsterworth, Lincolnshire
November 1982
Chromogenic print Image: 19.4 x 24cm (7 5/8 x 9 7/16 in.) Sheet: 27.4 x 35cm (10 13/16 x 13 3/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Tom Wood (Irish, b. 1951) Between Chester and Birkenhead
1989
Vintage gelatin silver print Image: 17.2 x 26.1cm (6 3/4 x 10 1/4 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.2cm (11 x 13 7/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Tom Wood (Irish, b. 1951) Lime Street
1995, printed 1997
Analogue hand print Image: 19 x 25.6 cm (7 1/2 x 10 1/16 in.) Sheet: 19.8 x 27.2cm (7 13/16 x 10 11/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Sunil Gupta on Community and Activism
Sunil Gupta, photographer, curator, writer, and activist has maintained a visionary approach to photography, producing bodies of work with keen social and political commentary. Gupta’s diasporic experience of multiple cultures informs a practice dedicated to themes of race, migration, and queer identity. His photographic projects – born from a desire to see himself and others like him represented in art history – draw upon his own life as a point of departure.
The Arnold Newman Lecture Series on Photography provides a forum for leading photographers, primarily known for portraits, to discuss contemporary issues in the medium. Arnold Newman (1918-2006) is acknowledged as one of the great masters of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries whose work changed portraiture. The Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation generously supported this series to make such conversations available to the public.
A landmark in nonfiction filmmaking, Handsworth Songs was the first film directed by the Ghanaian-born artist John Akomfrah. It was produced by the Black Audio Film Collective (1982-1998), a group of experimental Black artists who examined the diasporic African and Asian experience in Britain. The film weaves archival footage with scenes, interviews, and pictures from contemporary events, including photographs by Vanley Burke, with a haunting soundtrack that mixes reggae and post-punk music with industrial noises and voiceovers. This layered structure connects Britain’s colonial past with unrest in London’s Tottenham and Brixton neighbourhoods and Birmingham’s Handsworth area in 1985. Today, Handsworth Songs reveals the solidarity shared by Britons of African and Asian descent in the face of inequality as it brings historical perspective to civil disturbances in the 1980s.
This film includes depictions of police violence and the use of racial slurs. Viewer discretion is advised.
Wall text from the exhibition
Chris Steele-Perkins (British, b. 1947) Hypnosis Demonstration, Cambridge University Ball
1980-1989
Silver dye bleach print Image: 25.4 × 38.1cm (10 × 15 in.) Sheet: 30.2 × 40.4cm (11 7/8 × 15 7/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Paul Reas (British, b. 1955) Constable County, Flatford Mill, Suffolk
c. 1992
From the series Flogging a Dead Horse Inkjet print image: 41 x 50.5cm (16 1/8 x 19 7/8 in.) Sheet: 50.5 x 61cm (19 7/8 x 24 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
National Gallery of Art
National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets
Constitution Avenue NW, Washington
So many words have been written about the gritty photographs of British photographer Chris Killip that sometimes it feels hard to say something new, something that reveals more about the work. Perhaps I am just adding to the noise around the artist? What can I say that is insightful / eloquent?
Please allow me to talk about how the work makes me feel … interspersed with some of the facts that we know.
I feel humble before this work. Somehow less important as human being than the directness of the photographers vision and the stories he tells through his photographs about salt of the earth people. Human beings existing, getting by, in hardship, in winter, gathering coal at the edge of the sea under the ramparts of a power station – a tough place but not an unhappy place.
“Killip says that Lynemouth, where the sea-coalers worked, was a “tough place, but it wasn’t an unhappy place … There was lots of energy and lots of fun,” he adds. “There was rivalry and enthusiasms and passions. People were not despairing. It was a very complex community and with a great sense of purpose, which was: get the coal and make money. And I’ve always been interested in places that had purpose.”1
Killip’s purpose was to capture human dignity amid industrial decline in England’s north-east, “the human element of economic deprivation” and the resilience of communities affected. He embedded himself in his community – “I stayed in Newcastle for fifteen years. I mean, to get the access to photograph the sea-coal workers took eight years. You do get embroiled in a place”2 – in order for people to accept his presence and be relaxed in front of his large format camera. It’s almost as though the photographer and his very big, very visible camera were part of the scenery, as though the photographer and his equipment became invisible, indivisible from the story.
“In Winter 1983, believing his photographs felt too ‘remote’, Killip acquired a caravan of his own, and moved it onto the beach. Despite storm and snow, he could now photograph at will, in accordance with he rhythms of life on the camp itself. Killip tempers the extreme conditions of work with intimacy, kinships, and the quiet dignities of family life – so much so, that ‘photography’ seems hardly involved.”3
So much so, that ‘photography’ seems hardly involved. Just take a second to think about that statement.
And so admiration is another feeling that swells in the breast, through an understanding of how difficult these poetic images would have been to take with a large format camera (slung around the photographer’s neck, fired using a pistol grip in his hand without Killip ever looking through the lens, the artist just going on when it felt right to take a photograph and the intensity of the moment). How much patience, time, knowledge of the history of art and photography, technique and visualisation it would take to imagine these images into existence: these intimate photographs of families, friends, dogs, motorcycles, cars, ships, cranes and idle time that showcase not only Killip’s empathy for subject matter but also for himself, for he is also part of the story.4
“For a photographer whose work was grounded in the urgent value of documenting “ordinary” peoples’ lives, these nuanced images – radiating a vast stillness of light and time, embedded with the granularity of lives lived – reveal Killip’s conviction that no life is ordinary: everyday lives are sublime.”5
Killip’s visualisations always engage with the light of being and the place of existence with honesty and integrity. To see this, just look at the pairing and sequencing of images from Creative Camera in May 1977 at the end of the posting. A graveyard overlooked by a far away power station opposite two old men, the bald man’s hat hanging on the railing, overlooked by an “all out” demonstration poster; a man with platform shoes and flares, slumped on the ground bracing himself with a tattooed arm, surrounded by graffiti, supports a sleeping almost dead child in the crook of his other arm… whilst opposite a desolate scene of public housing, bleak pillars and fleeing mother and child overwhelmed by concrete madness; and a shrouded, dark, bent, woman in silhouette opposite the trappings of power in the civic robes of the mayors of Jarrow and South Shields. Every life is valuable.
Early influences in the Isle of Man images come from photographers such as August Sander, Paul Strand and Frank Sutcliffe. Later photographs have hints of the photo stories of Bill Brandt. Ultimately Killip forged his own authentic voice as an artist through his persistence in documenting “the human element of economic deprivation” and the resilience of communities affected. As he observed, “I wanted to record people’s lives because I valued them. I wanted them to be remembered. If you take a photograph of someone they are immortalised, they’re there forever. For me that was important, that you’re acknowledging people’s lives, and also contextualising people’s lives.”6
Killip’s focused (ie. in the zone, a mental state of focused concentration on the performance of an activity, in which one dissociates oneself from distracting or irrelevant aspects of one’s environment), complex and layered photographs are forever present. In a world where “there is nothing permanent except change” (Heraclitus), and where there are few traces left of the transitional worlds that Killip was documenting – “The sea-coal camp has gone, so have the coal mine and the power station. The area has been landscaped and now looks like an unused golf course. You would never know that the sea-coal camp had existed.”7 – Killip’s palpable realities make these human beings live and breathe again.
We care about them because Killip’s photographs enable within us a clarity of perception that means we are able to grasp what is there, the way it is. “If reality enters you without distortion, that is proper perception. The rest is distortion.” (Sadhguru)
Clear seeing and clear feeling. Where the forever is ever present.
4/ Here we could adapt what Pierre Boulez said about his work Pli selon pli (Fold by fold): “So, fold by fold, as the five movements develop, a portrait of Killip is revealed.” See Anonymous. “Pli selon pli,” on the Wikipedia website Nd Footnote 3 [Online] Cited 10/02/2023
Many thankx to The Photographers’ Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographers in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“The photography that I practice takes place in a specific time and place, depicting real moments in peoples lives. In many ways I think of myself as a historian, but not of the world. History is most often written from a distance, and rarely from the viewpoint of those who endured it.”
“I don’t want photography to transcend its subject matter, but for many art historians that is the limitation of photography … I don’t see it as a limitation; it puts me more in the camp of photography than art when I say I don’t acknowledge that as a limitation, I acknowledge it as an interesting fact and strength. Why would I want to transcend the subject when I am interested in the subject matter.”
Chris Killip
“The working class get it in the neck basically, they’re the bottom of the pile,” says Chris Killip. “I wanted to record people’s lives because I valued them. I wanted them to be remembered. If you take a photograph of someone they are immortalised, they’re there forever. For me that was important, that you’re acknowledging people’s lives, and also contextualising people’s lives.”
‘I didn’t set out to be the photographer of the English de-Industrial Revolution. It happened all around me during the time I was photographing’ Chris Killip, 2019
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’.”
Anonymous. “Chris Killip,” on the Magnum Photos website Nd [Online] Cited 26/01/2023
Chris Killip’s continued efforts to value and document the lives of those affected by the economic shifts in the North of England, throughout the 1970s and 80s, have made him one of the most influential figures of British Photography. This retrospective exhibition of more than 140 works, serves as the most comprehensive survey of the photographer’s work to date and includes previously unseen works.
His sustained immersion into the communities he photographed remains without parallel. Whilst marking a moment of deindustrialisation, Killip’s stark yet tender observation moves beyond the urgency to record such circumstances, to affirm the value of lives he grew close to – lives that, as he once described ‘had history done to them’, who felt history’s malicious disregard and yet, like the photographer himself, refused to yield or look away.
Against a background of shipbuilding and coal mining, he witnessed the togetherness of communities and the industries that sustained them and stayed long enough to see their loss.
Text from The Photographers’ Gallery website
Chris Killip, retrospective trailer – The Photographers’ Gallery (7 October 22 – 19 February 23)
This retrospective exhibition of more than 140 works, serves as the most comprehensive survey of the photographer’s work to date and includes previously unseen works. Chris Killip’s continued efforts to value and document the lives of those affected by the economic shifts in the North of England, throughout the 1970s and 80s, have made him one of the most influential figures of British Photography.
Chris Killip, retrospective – An Interview with Exhibition Curators Tracy Marshall Grant and Ken Grant
An interview with Chris Killip, retrospective exhibition curators Tracy Marshall-Grant and Ken Grant.
CAMERA Exhibitions: Chris Killip, retrospective. The Photographers Gallery
This retrospective exhibition of more than 140 works, serves as the most comprehensive survey of Chris Killip’s work to date and includes previously unseen works.
Chris Killip
In 1963, aged 17, Chris Fillip opened a copy of Paris Match magazine hoping for news of the Tour de France cycle race, and instead found Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photograph of a boy carrying two bottles of wine in Rue Mouffetard, Paris. Sensing the potential for photography to serve as an untethered means of expression, Killip’s life took a new turn. He didn’t own a camera, yet nevertheless told his father he would become a photographer. A summer working as a beach photographer earned him enough to leave for London in 1964, where he finally secured a position assisting the commercial photographer Adrian Flowers.
Killip’s immersion into the London cultural scene of te 1960s, share with painters and musicians, brought an appreciation for its buoyant gallery culture and an education that was both self-directed and formative. Quickly establishing himself as a sought-after freelance assistant, he led the production of major campaigns, until a 1969 trip to New York prompted an epiphany and a return to his native Isle of Man. There, he began the first of the long-term bodies of worksheet would define his career, each of which are characterised by their independence, tenderness and profound humanity.
Chris Killip’s legacy bears witness to an era of deindustrialisation, whilst serving as a portent to its longer consequences. From that first urgent return to the Isle of Man, into the early 1970s, when he first photographed in the North of England, until his death in October 2020, Fillip remained close to those he photographed ‘those’, he once said, ‘who’d had history done to them’.
Wall text from the exhibition
Isle of Man 1970-1973
In Autumn 1969, while in New York for a commercial photo shoot, a visit to Bill Brandt’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art would cause Killip’s life to change course again. It was the permanent collection that inspired him most: Paul Strand, August Sander, Walker Evans… each offered license to make photography for its own sake, free of commercial imperatives, and Fillip left the museum reeling. That same evening, he rang his father, telling him he would return to the Isle of Man to photograph.
By the late 1960s, a peasant culture that had long word the land and sea had been joined by many working financial enterprises on the island. Two instinct Isles of Man were emerging, one of which was now threatened. Between 1970 and 1972, Fillip photographed during the day and worked evenings in his father’s pub. Time away from the island had clarified the political shifts and external influences that were coming to bear on his family and their community, and he knew the urgency of his task. Though completed in 1973, Isle of Man: A book about the Manx, was published in 1980.
Mr Radcliffe remained a bachelor all his life. When he was given a print of this photograph he folded it in four and put it in his pocket, but told the photographer he was glad to have it as he had lost his cat in the meantime to a traffic accident.
In Thrashing, Grenaby … I think I failed better, although I suspect that its atmosphere of ‘bucolic idyll’ would be a different sort of problem. This photograph more accurately describes threshing work, and shows something from the past: agricultural labour as communal effort.
“Making a portrait fills me with a certain amount of dread. It’s the impertinence of what you are about to do in reducing a human being into one fixed moment. You think about the subject’s complexity (knowing them makes this worse) and the predetermined limitations that surround any attempt at portraiture. Then you convince yourself that you have to try, and you go ahead. This brief moment between you and the person in front of you is based on their trust in your intent.”
~ Chris Killip
Early work 1974-1977
In 1972, a commission by the Arts Council of Great Britain led Fillip to photograph Bury St Edmunds and Huddersfield. Drawn to the Yorkshire city’s mills, tenement housing and workplaces, he photographed widely in the region, making portraits in the street, and settling on an approach that would continue in subsequent decades.
After a move to Newcastle in 1975 to undertake a British Gas / Northern Arts Fellowship, Fillip used his non-contracted time to photograph independently. From the edges of the shipyards near his new home, to the coalmining towns of Castleford and Workington, he gathered an understanding of the industrial regions of the North and built an accord with the communities bound by them. An early search for a Newcastle darkroom led to Amber Films, an association that would eventually see him taking on the directorship of Amber’s Side Gallery between 1977-1979.
In May 1977, the editors of Creative Camera magazine [see the end of this posting] gave over the entire issue to a portfolio of Killip’s Northeast photographs – a rare move that acknowledged the work’s authority, whilst suggesting something of the potential future sequencing of work drawn from across the region.
The boy with his Punk hair and boots seems to be a study in bravado and insecurity, recorded with magnifying glass clarity by a 5 × 4 camera. Chris later told me that he had captured this unlikely picture by putting a false lens on the side of his view camera (à la Paul Strand) and wearing a hazard jacket, like a council surveyor.
Mark Haworth-Booth. “Chris Killip,” on the V&A Blog website October 30, 2020 [Online] Cited 26/01/2023
“When I was making my shipbuilding photographs I didn’t show them to anyone, as shipbuilding on Tyneside had become a personal obsession. I made them with a sense of urgency as I thought it wasn’t going to last. I didn’t set out to be the photographer of the English de-industrial revolution, it happened all around me during the time I was photographing.”
~ Chris Killip
This photograph belongs to a bigger series by Chris Killip called The Last Ships, which traces the decline of shipbuilding on the Tyne. “I made them with a sense of urgency, as I thought it wasn’t going to last,” Killip said later. “I didn’t set out to be the photographer of the English de-Industrial Revolution. It happened all around me during the time I was photographing.”
Killip was intrigued by the contrast between the epic scale of the ships that loomed over the streets of Wallsend and South Shields and the working-class communities that lived in their shadow. Here, children play on a quiet terraced street beneath the towering outline of the Tyne Pride, the biggest ship ever built on the Tyne and, as it turned out, one of the last. The red-brick houses, the stone wall, the fog lend the scene an almost Victorian feel. Within a few years, though, that way of life came to an end with a brutal finality. Just two years after this photograph was taken, Killip made another in the same place: the street was demolished, the community scattered. …
Many of Killip’s shipbuilding photographs, though, remained unseen until recently. Now, alongside three other series he made in the north-east – The Station (1985), Skinningrove (1981-84) and Portraits (1970-89) – The Last Ships (1975-1977) has been published as a large format zine. The scale suits the subject matter perfectly. The images, which move from the epic to the intimate, evoke another England in which the terms “working class” and “community” were still synonymous. It seems an eternity ago.
“The ship was so massive you could see it from miles around dominating the area, not to mention the cranes and the noises from the yard which could be heard clattering through the night. When I think of those yards, which have just been filled in, flattened and abandoned, I think it’s a crying shame. We’re an island nation that cannot build a ship. If I had to pick a symbol to represent what the shipyards meant to me, it was the comradeship in the yards. We were a close-knit community of people living and working together. Everyone relied on each other and are all linked. When I look at the remains of what’s left I feel nothing. The community’s gone. There’s nothing left. It hasn’t changed for the best. You’ve saved money and destroyed this community.”
Frank Duke quoted in Hunter Charlton. Landscape and Change: Shipbuilding and Identity on the Tyne. University of Bristol, 2015, p. 4.
Killip first attempted to photograph the beach at Lynemouth, Northumberland, in 1976, only to be chased away by men on horse-drawn carts wary of any stranger. He’d hoped to photograph as winter tides returned the waste coal expelled into the sea from a nearby mine. After attempts over several years were met with violent rejection, Killip’s eventual acceptance came in 1982, when visiting a pub the seculars frequented to make a final plea. A man recognised him as the Manx photographer he’d give tea and shelter to during a rainstorm at Appleby Horse Fair, and confirmed Killip’s intentions were good.
In Winter 1983, believing his photographs felt too ‘remote’, Killip acquired a caravan of his own, and moved it onto the beach. Despite storm and snow, he could now photograph at will, in accordance with he rhythms of life on the camp itself. Killip tempers the extreme conditions of work with intimacy, kinships, and the quiet dignities of family life – so much so, that ‘photography’ seems hardly involved. Perhaps that’s what Killip liked so much when, years later, he called the words of seacoaler Brian Ladler, ‘…the commandment: love one another. It’s not a bad idea, is it Chris?’
In 1975 Chris Killip received a fellowship from the Northern Gas Board to photograph the laying of a natural gas pipeline near Newcastle, which for him became the start of a deep engagement with that area of the North East. He first attempted to photograph on Lynemouth Beach in 1976 but was quickly given the boot by those living and working there – again he tried, and in the end it took nearly six years to gain the trust of the community.
Between 1982 to 1984, Killip lived on and off in a caravan at the seacoal camp in Lynemouth – becoming an embedded part of the community, Killip observed the daily struggles to work and survive in this inhospitable environment. As well as the scenes of hard working conditions, images of tenderness in the relationships between the residents show kindness and camaraderie in times of uncertainty as the region underwent rapid de-industrialisation.
‘I remember speaking with Josef Koudelka in 1975 about why I should stay in Newcastle. Josef said that you could bring in six Magnum photographers, and they could stay and photograph for six weeks – and he felt that inevitably their photographs would have a sort of similarity. As good as they were, their photographs wouldn’t get beyond a certain point. But if you stayed for two years, your pictures would be different, and if you stayed for three years they would be different again. You could get under the skin of a place and do something different, because you were then photographing from the inside. I understood what he was talking about. I stayed in Newcastle for fifteen years. I mean, to get the access to photograph the sea-coal workers took eight years. You do get embroiled in a place.’
Killip’s photos have an austere beauty to them – such as the image of a man nicknamed “Cookie” purposefully walking through a snowstorm. But the stories behind them can be quite humorous.
“Cookie was one of the people I was very friendly with,” Killip says. “It was a Sunday morning and his horse, Creamy, had just won a trotting race against guys from town. He’d won a £1,000. The race takes place very early so the police aren’t around. Then we go to the pub – at half past 7 in the morning – and the drinks are on Cookie because he has all of this money.
“Walking back to camp, I knew Cookie had to come back that way,” he adds. “I put the camera on the tripod and I’m swaying quite a bit because I’m drunk. But I knew exactly when I was going to take the picture of him. He didn’t lift his head. I took that one picture, just one frame.” …
Killip says that Lynemouth, where the sea-coalers worked, was a “tough place, but it wasn’t an unhappy place.”
“There was lots of energy and lots of fun,” he adds. “There was rivalry and enthusiasms and passions. People were not despairing. It was a very complex community and with a great sense of purpose, which was: get the coal and make money. And I’ve always been interested in places that had purpose.”
Chris Killip: I’m still in touch with the sea-coalers that I was big friends with and I’m up to date with how they are doing now that they have moved away from the area. The sea-coal camp has gone, so have the coal mine and the power station. The area has been landscaped and now looks like an unused golf course. You would never know that the sea-coal camp had existed.
I went back to Skinningrove three years ago and that was a big shock as it was so quiet as only two boats do any fishing from there. Everyone else has stopped as they couldn’t keep up with European Economic Community and Health and Safety regulations. It was as if all the life had gone out of the place.
The Photographers’ Gallery this autumn presents a full-career retrospective of work by one of the UK’s most important and influential post-war documentary photographers, Chris Killip (1946-2020).
Taking place over two upper floors of the Gallery, the retrospective exhibition of more than 150 works serves as the most comprehensive survey of the photographer’s work to date and includes previously unseen ephemera and colour works.
Grounded in his sustained immersion into the communities he photographed, Chris Killip’s photographs of those affected by economic shifts throughout the 1970s and 80s in the North of England remain without parallel. Whilst marking a moment of deindustrialisation, Killip’s stark yet tender observation moves beyond the urgency to record such circumstances, to affirm the value of lives he grew close to – lives that, as he once described ‘had history done to them’, who felt history’s malicious disregard and yet, like the photographer himself, refused to yield or look away.
From early work made in his native Isle of Man, through overlapping series’ made over two decades in the North of England, Killip’s approach to portraying communities is explored. Against a background of shipbuilding and coal mining, he witnessed the togetherness of communities and the industries that sustained them and stayed long enough to see their loss. At Lynemouth, for his series ‘Seacoal’, he photographed men on horse-driven carts reclaiming coal which had been discarded into the sea by a nearby mine, and at Skinningrove he documented a group of young men, their friendships and labours as they waited for the tide to turn.
The exhibition, curated by Tracy Marshall-Grant and Ken Grant, also draws upon less familiar work by a photographer whose life and career has proved so influential in shaping British photography. Killip’s dedicated recording of the miners’ strike of 1984-1985 and his engagement with shipbuilding a decade earlier, remain lesser known yet pivotal works that betrayed not only a changing economy, but the concerns of a photographer moved to witness them. In dialogue with the prints made by the photographer towards the end of his life, the exhibition also considers Killip’s photo books, drawing on early maquettes to map the development of books acknowledged as landmarks in the genre and offer new perspectives on the photographer’s storytelling.
The exhibition is accompanied by a major monograph co-published with Thames and Hudson, edited by Ken Grant and Tracy Marshall-Grant and designed by Niall Sweeney. The book includes a foreword by Brett Rogers, in depth essays by Ken Grant and texts by Amanda Maddox, Greg Halpern and Lynsey Hanley. The exhibition will tour to the BALTIC Centre of Contemporary Art in 2023. Exhibition supported by the Isle of Man Arts Council.
Chris Killip
Born in Douglas, Isle of Man in 1946, Chris Killip left school at age sixteen and joined the only four star hotel on the Isle of Man as a trainee hotel manager. In June 1964 he decided to pursue photography full time. He worked as a freelance assistant for various photographers in London from 1966-1969. In 1969, after seeing his very first exhibition of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he decided to return to photograph in the Isle of Man. In 1972 he received a commission from The Arts Council of Great Britain to photograph Huddersfield and Bury St Edmunds for the exhibition Two Views – Two Cities. In 1975, he moved to live in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on a two year fellowship as the Northern Arts Photography Fellow. He was a founding member, exhibition curator and advisor of Side Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, as well as its director, from 1977-1979. In 1989 he received the Henri Cartier Bresson Award and in 1991 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 1994-1998. He retired from Harvard in December 2017 and died in 2020. His work is featured in the permanent collections of major institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; George Eastman House; Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; Museum Folkwang, Essen; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Press release from The Photographers’ Gallery
The Time of In Flagrante 1976-1987
In 1985, David Godwin, then Editor at Secker & Warburg, had written to Fillip to suggest that if he wished to make another book, he would like to publish it. Although Secker had no track record of working with photography, Fillip liked the prospect of reaching a wider audience and a collaboration began with editor Mark Holborn and designer Peter Dyer that led to the 1988 book In Flagrante.
In Flagrante‘s achievements are manifold. Whilst Fillip threw himself into long term series, like the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, the uncoupling of photographs from their original contexts freed them from more conventional narratives. Mindful of the Yeats poem He wishes for the cloths of heaven, which head chosen to open the book, Killip reads softly, to achieve work that John Berger recognised as being ‘branded, like a hundred cattle, with the tenderness of those eight lines.’
Wall text from the exhibition
He wishes for the cloths of heaven
W.B. Yeats 1899
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Replaced in In Flagrante Two (2016) with:
“The photographs date from 1973 to 1985 when the Prime Ministers were: Edward Heath, Conservative (1970-1974), Harold Wilson, Labour (1974-1976), James Callaghan, Labour (1976-1979), Margaret Thatcher, Conservative (1979-1990).”
“In Flagrante means ‘caught in the act,’ and that’s what my pictures are. You can see me in the shadow, but I’m trying to undermine your confidence in what you’re seeing, to remind people that photographs are a construction, a fabrication. They were made by somebody. They are not to be trusted. It’s as simple as that.” ~ Chris Killip
Chris Killip: My camera’s very visible. It’s big. And there’s something good about this, where you have to deal with the fact that I am a photographer and I am here. Look at this great big contraption.
Laura Hubber: When you take a picture of someone, what are you hoping to capture or convey?
CK: I don’t know. You want the picture to be good. You want the picture to represent the complexity that you know that this person has.
My pictures are a mixture of people I know well and intimately and people I don’t know.
It’s more difficult when you have strong feelings about the person. Sometimes you’re more successful when you know less about someone, because I think I see them more clearly. I don’t see them as my friend, or the people that I know, or a person that I maybe even don’t like that much or something. They have no baggage. I see them just as a visual thing with no preconditions.
“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
Killip photographed Skinningrove, North Yorkshire, between 1982 and 1984, but first noted it during an early drive up the east coast of England in 1974. He’d been impressed by the steelworks, which had sat above the village since the 1870s to service ironstone excavation, and noticed that, by any measure, Skinningrove was ‘a difficult place to see’.
Villagers dovetailed shifts on the hill with fishing, forcibly discouraging those inclined to trespass in their waters. Killip’s presence in the village was made easier by a young local called Leso, who calmed anyone nervous of the camera. Leso’s life was tragically cut short after the fishing boat in which he and some friends had been at sea overturned. Leso and his friend David drowned, while Bever was washed ashore. After David’s mother asked for photographs of her lost son, Killip made her an album of three dozen photographs showing the boy between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. He would go on to do the same for Leso’s father, later reflecting that if this gesture, between precious life and loss, was the only reason to have even been in the village at all, perhaps that was reason enough.
Wall text from the exhibition
Killip’s working practice is distinctive for the way he immerses himself into the communities he photographs and builds relationships with his subjects over a long period of time. This close level of involvement shows itself through images that are sensitive to the local environment and its inhabitants, as seen in the Skinningrove series.
There’s nothing showy about these pictures. Framing and composition just seem to occur — which is, of course, the highest compliment one can pay a photographer. A photograph like “Crabs and People” requires a second look, or even a third, to realize how much is going on in it: the people, the dogs, the interplay of car and pram and cart, of ocean and rock.
Chris Killip’s Crabs and People, Skinningrove, North Yorkshire, UK 1981 showing the construction of the pictorial plane, including Killip’s use of opposing triangles, the two people looking away to form the vanishing point, the man in the car looking towards the camera and the two dogs facing out of the picture in opposite directions.
Chris Killip might not be as well known as Martin Parr or have the cult kudos of Tony Ray-Jones, but the work he produced in the 1970s and ’80s arguably stands above either of them. Killip was born on the Isle of Man and returned there after quitting commercial photography in the early 1970s to concentrate on the communities he grew up amongst. It still looks like the 1930s: men till fields with horses, stone walls grid the landscape under glowering skies. Killip’s portraits are full of dignity and empathy for the relentless bleak toil of these people’s lives. It would be a fine body of work in itself, but it’s what comes next that makes this show so vital.
Taking his cues from the changes he saw happening to the traditional Manx way of life, Killip started exploring other disintegrating communities in the north of England: Tyne shipbuilders, steelworkers in Yorkshire and seacoal scavengers on the Northumbrian coast. The prow of gigantic oil tanker Tyne Pride appears suddenly and surreally at the end of a glum terraced street as children play in its shadow. But the ship’s buyer fell through, and when Killip returns two years later, the shipyard is gone and the street is being demolished. …
Killip isn’t brutal for brutality’s sake. If anything, the overriding emotion here is tenderness coupled with a certain discreet awe that people want to continue, to strive, to live. That’s the real power of this show. Whether it’s gangs of glue-sniffers or burly men trying to get a rare ray of seaside sunshine, the people that Killip portrays, and the landscapes they inhabit, are always shockingly, immediately alive, full of interest and possibility. Possibility that they are always denied, except through Killip’s photography.
In the short film, “Skinningrove,” 2013, Chris Killip tells personal stories about the people in his photographs. Director Michael Almereyda made the film from a lecture Killip gave at Harvard University.
Killip points out he spent years getting to know the area, living in Newcastle for 26 years (from 1975, when he won a two-year fellowship from Northern Arts to photograph North East England, until 1991, when he started teaching at Harvard).
He says he stayed because he liked it, and that he might never have left had the Harvard job not come along – but he was also inspired by the Magnum photographer Josef Koudelka, who came to visit him early on and “talked about the importance of being in one place, to get under the surface of things”. He was also interested in how differently Paul Strand and Manuel Alvarez Bravo photographed Mexico, he says, despite Strand’s sympathetic, card-carrying Communist credentials.
“Strand beautifies poverty and simplifies the Mexican people into ‘the poor Mexicans, but isn’t this wonderful visually’,” he says. “But Alvarez Bravo was Mexican, his pictures are very complicated because he was able to accept ambiguities and contradictions, which Strand couldn’t… I think because I lived in Newcastle for so long I was able to accept ambiguities and not worry about them, just accept them and show them. I wanted to be there and be more accepting.”
‘I went to my father and said: Dad, I’m going to become a photographer’ Interview with Chris Killip
Born on the Isle of Man in 1946, Chris Killip was a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University where he had taught from 1991. Since 2012 he has held solo exhibitions at Museum Folkwang, Essen; Le Bal, Paris; Tate Britain, London; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Killip’s works are held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; George Eastman House, Rochester; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. His books with Steidl are ‘Pirelli Work’ (2006), ‘Seacoal’ (2011), ‘Arbeit / Work’ (2012), ‘Isle of Man Revisited’ (2015), ‘In Flagrante Two’ (2016) and most recently ‘The Station’ (2020).
“Inside, the place was painted black. The ceiling was black, the floor was black. There were no lights. I was photographing with my big 4×5 plate camera and Norman flash. And in the end, there was a sameness about all the pictures. So after about six months I stopped because I felt I was repeating myself.
I used one photo for my book ‘In Flagrante’ and packed the rest away. I forgot I even had them. Then in 2016 my son was in my studio looking through some boxes and said, ‘Dad you should really do something with these photos.’ That’s how the book, The Station, came about. Looking back, I didn’t realise what I had. If my son hadn’t kicked me up the backside to go and look at them again, they’d still be in that box now. …
“There is a great value in capturing these cultural moments. It’s a part of somebody else’s history, and it’s a history that gets overlooked. Young people doing something – succeeding at doing something, organising this club, running it successfully – it’s all forgotten. My hope is that it can be an inspiration to young people today. As in: get your act together, don’t ask permission, get on with it and do it. Raise some money, you know. That’s what they did.”
In 1985, Chris Killip was “trying unsuccessfully to photograph nightlife in Newcastle” when a friend told him about the Station, a former police social club in nearby Gateshead that had been turned into a live venue by a collective of local punks.
“I went there and everything else around it had been demolished,” he recalls. “You could hear the music echoing across this vast urban wasteland as you approached the building. Inside, the noise coming off the stage was deafening and the punks were thrashing around, banging into each other, drinks flying. I just stood there. It was so loud and so intense that I was overwhelmed.”
Nevertheless, between March and October, Killip returned to the Station “about 20 times”, placing himself in the centre of the maelstrom in order to capture the visceral energy of the place. …
He describes the Station fondly as “a total anarcho-punk zone: black walls, black ceiling, black floor. There was a big sign saying, ‘No glue, no glass bottles’, but there was a bit of glue-sniffing and gallons of strong cheap cider. Basically they didn’t have money for better drugs.”
The atmosphere, he says, was charged but never threatening despite the pummelling music and the ritual aggression enacted on the dance floor. Throughout his time there, he never witnessed a single fight or experienced any hassle save for one “mad-eyed guy” who would occasionally emerge from the melee “to take a swing” at his head.
In the pitch-black interior of the Station, he cut a curious figure, carrying a big plate camera around his neck as well as a flash and an outsized battery that was strapped to his waist. “No one ever said, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ They were in their own world and I was in mine. I was concentrating so much that I never had time to chat. After three hours in there, I’d be totally exhausted. I used to drive home and go straight to sleep, the noise ringing in my ears.” …
“It [The Station] created its own scene, not dependent on elsewhere. For the people who went there every week, it was part of their identity. It had a meaning for them that outsiders would have found hard to understand. It was a place for them to consolidate their identity. In Thatcher’s Britain, they were the ignored, the overlooked, the dismissed. The Station was their home. It was them.”
1977-1978 were tumultuous years in Britain. In 1977 Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her Silver Jubilee but the disaffection and alienation of large sections of society were evidenced in the numerous riots, strikes and protests that spread across the country. There were many “youth cultural movements in the late 1970s in the UK – namely skinheads, punks, and soulboys – along with the social, political, and cultural tensions between them.” Racism and homophobia were rife in both West Indian and white British communities.
Punk ruled the airwaves and the streets, the “Yorkshire Ripper” was running amok and undertakers went on strike in London, leaving more than 800 corpses unburied. “On 7 June, Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren and the record label Virgin arranged to charter a private boat and have the Sex Pistols perform while sailing down the River Thames, passing Westminster Pier and the Houses of Parliament. The event, a mockery of the Queen’s river procession planned for two days later, ended in chaos. Police launches forced the boat to dock, and constabulary surrounded the gangplanks at the pier. While the band members and their equipment were hustled down a side stairwell, McLaren, Vivienne Westwood, and many of the band’s entourage were arrested.”1
On the 13th August 1977, the Battle of Lewisham took place took place, “when 500 members of the far-right National Front (NF) attempted to march from New Cross to Lewisham in southeast London and various counter-demonstrations by approximately 4,000 people led to violent clashes between the two groups and between the anti-NF demonstrators and police.”1 On the 30th January 1978, then opposition leader Margaret Thatcher says that many Britons fear being “swamped by people with a different culture”.
And on the 4th May 24-year-old Bengali leather garments worker Altab Ali is murdered in East London in a racially motivated attack which mobilises the British Bangladeshi community to protest. These photographs pay tribute to the activists who mobilised around the rallying cry of justice that followed.
Socio-documentary photographers like Paul Trevor are vital in recording the roiling emotions and feelings of people during periods of great stress, protest and change. What is striking about his documentary photographs of the local Bengali community’s mobilisation against racist violence and institutional police racism is their power and directness – the grim determination of the people and their anger against what was and had been happening to them for a very long time comes across in the photographs with visceral force, perhaps even their anger against being photographed as well. The looks of defiance aimed at the camera lens is an act of defiance toward racism itself – no more they are saying. Never again!
We can see it in they eyes of the elderly gentleman in shirt and tie (with the protective, open hand across his chest) and the women at right in the photograph Adler Street, London E1, 14 May 1978. The start of the march behind Altab Ali’s coffin from Whitechapel to Hyde Park, organised by the Action Committee Against Racial Attack (ACARA) (1978, above); we can observe it in the stare of the man underneath the placard at left in the photograph Hyde Park, London W2, 14 May 1978. Rally following the march behind Altab Ali’s coffin from Whitechapel, organised by the Action Committee Against Racial Attacks (ACARA) (1978, below); and we can feel it in the gaze of the man at right in the photograph Leadenhall Street, London, 14 May 1978. Thousands of Bengalis follow the coffin of Altab Ali from Whitechapel to Hyde Park, organised by the Action Committee Against Racial Attacks (ACARA) (1978, below). We can feel the emotion, outrage, and passion in all of these photographs. We are human beings and we don’t deserve to be treated like animals…
Today, arm in arm, we still need to march to protect our freedoms and rights as human beings. And we still need photographs to document our resistance toward right wing ideology, discrimination and racism. Which reminds me – in the recent Commonwealth Games, “In 35 out of the 56 Commonwealth nations homosexuality is considered a crime, with some countries still punishing it with the death penalty… Seven Commonwealth nations have a maximum penalty of life imprisonment for being gay.”3 Still this, in the 21st century. It’s barbaric. And none of this hiding behind the cloak of religion and religious dogma … for religion is just a salve to the conscience of the unconscionable.
Brothers, we need to protest against discrimination and racism of any form around the world.
2/ Anonymous. “Battle of Lewisham,” on the Wikipedia website Nd [Online] Cited 21/08/2022
3/ Benjamin Butterworth. “Commonwealth Games 2022: Tom Daley and protesters criticise anti-gay laws in 35 Commonwealth countries,” on the iNews website, July 28, 2022 [Online] Cited 21/08/2022
Many thankx to Four Corners for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
“Tolerance, inter-cultural dialogue and respect for diversity are more essential than ever in a world where peoples are becoming more and more closely interconnected.”
Kofi Annan
“In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist. We must be anti-racist.”
Angela Davis
“Freedom is never given; it is won.”
A. Philip Randolph
On display at Four Corners: an exhibition of photographs by Paul Trevor, celebrating east London’s Bengali activists of 1978.
This exhibition reveals the dramatic events which were sparked by the racist murder of Altab Ali, a 24-year-old Bengali leather garments worker, and pays tribute to the activists who mobilised around the rallying cry of justice that followed.
Local East End photographer Paul Trevor documented how members of the local Bengali community endured racial abuse as a constant factor of everyday life, and the moment at which they mobilised against racist violence and institutional police racism. The exhibition brings together 75 of Trevor’s photographs for the first time, alongside oral history recordings by original activists.
The show marks the culmination of a major heritage project led by Four Corners and Swadhinata Trust, in partnership with Paul Trevor. With the help of volunteers and original activists, the project is creating a record of this watershed moment as told by local people. The exhibition, alongside project oral history interviews, short films and podcasts, will be available as a touring show, and will be lodged at the Bishopsgate Institute Archives.
Text from the Four Corners website
Altab Ali Day is held each year on 4 May. It commemorates the racist murder of a young Bengali man in 1978 and the transformative events that followed. East London’s Bengali community mobilised with mass demonstrations, meetings and sit-down protests. Their actions were a turning point in resistance against racism and discrimination in Britain.
Photographer Paul Trevor captured the dramatic events of that year. Guided by these photographs, Four Corners and Swadhinata Trust are working with local volunteers to record the memories of people involved at the time, creating a vital record of this watershed moment.
“On the week after that murder had taken place, maybe … six or 7,000 people, all different backgrounds, came to the park. And we walked behind his coffin in a black… van… We walked to Downing Street to protest and appeal for help. That was an extraordinary gathering of people from different backgrounds, from the mosque, from the churches, all sorts of people, different politics, Anti-Nazi League then joined us, but it was done at no notice, very just quickly from the heart. And it was yes, an important turning point I think.”
Dan Jones
“It was cold and wet and horrible, and a lot of people went home before we left Altab Ali Park as it is now… it was you know predominantly Bangladeshis that went, a lot of the men who’d normally be working but would have Sunday off were on it. It was quite remarkable like that… there was a great sense of solidarity in that.”
The hard facts about the resistance movement of the 1970s in East London are that different umbrella organisations at different periods of time were formed to mount the resistance movement in the 1970s in East London. It was never ever a national organisation and certainly not an individual, but the local community groups who mobilised the Bangladeshi community to mount the resistance movement. When the community was under attack by the far-right National Front (NF), we looked to the authority to protect us from the vicious racist attacks. However, the police turned a blind eye to the situation. Various local Bangladeshi organisations and the anti-racist individuals felt the necessity of forming an umbrella organisation to protect the community from racist attacks. The first such umbrella organisation was the ‘Anti Racist Committee of Asians in East London’ (ARCAEL). The ARCAEL organised a mass meeting at the Naaz cinema Hall in the middle of Brick Lane on 12th June 1976 and convinced the Bangladeshi community that we could not rely on the authorities to protect us and we had to fight back and defend ourselves. ARCAEL organised vigilante groups and confronted the NF thugs who would run their stall at the corner of Bethnal Green Road and Brick Lane every Sunday to sell their filthy propaganda literature and to recruit new members. The police took notice of these confrontations. However, this resulted in increasing numbers of arrests of the Asians. At one point the police told us that whichever group went to the spot first would be allowed to have their presence. We started mobilising ourselves early in the morning and the NF tried to be there before us. We then decided to start gathering at the corner of Brick Lane and Bethnal Green Road on Saturday evenings and kept on occupying the spot overnight.
It was the entire community under the leadership of ARCAEL engineered the resistance movement in East London in the 1970s.
After Altab Ali was brutally murdered on 4th May 1978, the Bangladeshi community vowed to stamp out racist attacks once and for all. We took to the street and we shouted slogans, “Enough is Enough” “Come What May, We Are Here to Stay.” “Here to Stay, Here to Fight” “Black and White Unite and Fight”. Immediately, after the death of Altab Ali, another umbrella organisation, “Action Committee Against Racial Attacks” (ACARA), was formed for the specific purpose of organising a national demonstration. In just 10 days preparation, ACARA successfully organised a National Demonstration to highlight the lack of police action to protect the victims of racial attacks in East London. We marched from Brick Lane to Hyde Park for a rally and then went to Downing Street to give a petition to the Prime Minister demanding a full investigation into the police handling of racist attacks in East London and more protection of immigrants. The petition was given by the chair of the ACARA, Mr Taibur Rahman who was accompanied by the General Secretary, Jamal Hasan and five other committee members, namely Shiraz Uddin, Shoeb Chowdhury, Gulam Mustafa, Akikur Rahman and Zia Uddin Lala.
One can see the news coverage with a photograph in front of 10 Downing Street in the East London Advertiser, dated 19th May 1978. This is available in the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, 277 Bancroft Rd, London E1 4DQ (near the Queen Mary University). Two days before the national demonstration, ACARA issued a press release which appeared in the East London Advertiser on 12 May 1978, “… In a joint statement, committee members Taibur Rahman, Jamal Hasan and Shiraz Uddin told the Advertiser: ‘This march condemns the death of Altab Ali. It has been called to publicise what is happening to Asians in East London so that everyone can learn of the attacks which make us daily victims…'”
From these two newspaper articles, it is obvious that it was the umbrella organisation ACARA which mobilised the community and organised the national demonstration. There were a few more umbrella organisations since 1978. Hackney and Tower Hamlets Defence Committee was another important umbrella organisation which organised a one day strike by the Asian and black workers in East London and had a sit-in protest in front of the Bethnal Green Police station demanding the release of some of our members who were arrested in the demonstration. The police had to give in to our demand and released the three of our members arrested earlier.
Jamal Hasan. “The big lie,” on the Altab Ali Foundation website May 2019 [Online] Cited 05/08/2022
Exhibition reveals a dramatic struggle for justice in east London A major exhibition of photographs by Paul Trevor documents a dramatic struggle for justice.
Following the racist murder of Altab Ali in May 1978, east London’s young Bengali community took to the streets in protest. Four Corners’ new exhibition, Brick Lane 1978: The Turning Point, brings together seventy of Paul Trevor’s images alongside accounts of pioneering activists, to produce a powerful narrative of the time.
The show marks the culmination of a major heritage project led by Four Corners and Swadhinata Trust with a dedicated group of volunteers, and who have interviewed many people involved in these momentous events. The exhibition pays tribute to a generation whose actions changed the course of civil rights in the UK.
Julie Begum, Chair of Swadhinata Trust, said, “It is important to commemorate Altab Ali Day to remember the racist violence the Bengali community faced in the East End of London, and to celebrate the community’s united defence to defeat the evils of racism.” Paul Trevor said: “They say a photo is worth a thousand words. But sometimes, as in this case, words are essential. This project is an opportunity to add the voices of those who made history to the images of that story.” Carla Mitchell, Artistic Development Director at Four Corners said: “This history is highly relevant today, with an increase of racist attacks and violence making the headlines. Thanks to National Lottery players we will be able to ensure that this powerful heritage is made publicly accessible for a wide audience of current & future generations.”
Historical background
1978 began with opposition leader Margaret Thatcher on ‘World in Action’ television programme saying that many Britons feared being “rather swamped by people with a different culture.” Her comments were seen as a direct appeal to would-be National Front voters in working class neighbourhoods. Racist violence was endemic in east London, and particularly around Brick Lane recently arrived Bengali migrants worked in the local rag trade, as had the Jews before them.
The National Front’s newspaper pitch at Brick Lane’s Sunday morning market attracted skinheads who harassed the local Bengali community. They were a target for far-right groups, who wrongly blamed them for high unemployment and bad housing. East London has always been a haven for migrants, from the French Huguenots fleeing 17th century religious persecution, to the Irish poor of the 19th century, and Jews escaping Cossack pogroms in Russia and Poland. It also has an equally long history of racist violence and resistance to it. Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists tried to march east to the docks in 1936, but were stopped by Jews, Irish dockers and communists in the famous ‘Battle of Cable Street’.
Altab Ali’s murder on the night of the May 1978 local elections in which 41 National Front candidates stood, marked a turning point for the Bengali community. 7,000 people marched behind his coffin to a rally in Hyde Park, then to Downing Street where they handed in a petition demanding police protection. That year young Bengali people mobilised in a community-led, anti-racist struggle which brought about a radical social transformation both locally and far beyond.
Anti-racist protests against the electoral threat of the far right National Front party were supported by a grass-roots, multi-cultural movement – Rock against Racism – which held open-air concerts in nearby Victoria Park, headlined by The Clash, Steel Pulse and Tom Robinson. Community protest and music radicalised a generation, and helped destroy National Front support.
Local photographer Paul Trevor documented the dramatic events of the era in over 400 photographs, many of which will be on show for the first time in this exhibition. His photographs show how the local Bengali community endured racial abuse as a constant factor of everyday life, and how they united to end violence and institutional racism. Trevor was also a member of the Half Moon Photography Workshop collective, whose work focused on socially-committed photography. Some of his images were covered in their Camerawork magazine: Exhibition Poster for Brick Lane 1978 A Community Under Attack; Review of the exhibition Brick Lane 1978. A community under attack.
By the end of 1978, the National Front was forced to leave its headquarters near Brick Lane, though far-right racist attacks in east London persisted into the 1990s. To this day the name Altab Ali remains linked with the struggle against racism and for human rights in London’s East End.
Press release from Four Corners, London
Paul Trevor
Trevor was born in London (b. 1947) and grew up on a kibbutz in Israel. He studied at the National Film & Television School, and was a founder member of Camerawork, the UK’s first radical photo magazine. In 1973, together with the photographers Chris Steele-Perkins and Nicholas Battye, he formed the Exit Photography Group. Their largest project, Survival Programmes documented life in the inner cities, both in photographs and recorded interviews over a period of six years. Works from the project were shown at the Side Gallery, Newcastle in 1982 and brought together in a book; the photographs here are drawn from this project. The works were as much about documenting the squalor of the inner cities, as they were about recording the process of poverty – inadequate housing, unemployment, overcrowding, illness and old age. The Exit archive is now housed and administered by the LSE.
“… the Bangladeshi workers who used to work in sweatshops by and large in the East End, experienced a lot of what they called Paki bashing… People would just for fun… they would beat isolated people walking on the streets.”
“And there was of course, the death of Altab Ali which caused the huge huge meeting, which of course we went to the community centre and we said we ought to call a protest and get the government to see that this stops because the police are not paying any attention… So from the Altab Ali meeting from the meeting of Anti-Racist Committee of Asians in East London, we called it ARCAEL… huge meeting in a cinema in Brick Lane. And when we called the meeting, we thought we’d get you know fifty people – thousands of people turned up, the cinema was full, and the entire Brick Lane was packed with people listening through loudspeakers outside… and the emotion poured out, the determination to do something poured out.”
The banner at left refers to Enoch Powell (British, 1912-1998), “politician, classical scholar, author, linguist, soldier, philologist, and poet. He served as a Conservative Member of Parliament (1950-1974) and was Minister of Health (1960-1963) then Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MP (1974-1987)…
Powell attracted widespread attention for his “Rivers of Blood” speech, delivered on 20 April 1968 to the General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre. In it, Powell criticised the rates of immigration into the UK, especially from the New Commonwealth, and opposed the anti-discrimination legislation Race Relations Bill. The speech drew sharp criticism from Powell’s own party members and the press, and Conservative Party leader Edward Heath removed Powell from his position as Shadow Defence Secretary…
Polls in the 1960s and 1970s showed that Powell’s views were popular among the British population at the time.[35] A Gallup poll, for example, showed that 75% of the population were sympathetic to Powell’s views. An NOP poll showed that approximately 75% of the British population agreed with Powell’s demand for non-white immigration to be halted completely, and about 60% agreed with his call for the repatriation of non-whites already resident in Britain.
The Rivers of Blood speech has been blamed for leading to violent attacks against British Pakistanis and other British Asians, which became frequent after the speech in 1968; however, there is “little agreement on the extent to which Powell was responsible for racial attacks”. These “Paki-bashing” attacks later peaked during the 1970s and 1980s.
Powell was mentioned in early versions of the 1969 song “Get Back” by the Beatles. This early version of the song, known as the “No Pakistanis” version, parodied the anti-immigrant views of Enoch Powell.
On 5 August 1976, Eric Clapton provoked an uproar and lingering controversy when he spoke out against increasing immigration during a concert in Birmingham. Visibly intoxicated, Clapton voiced his support of the controversial speech, and announced on stage that Britain was in danger of becoming a “black colony”. Among other things, Clapton said “Keep Britain white!” which was at the time a National Front (NF) slogan.
In November 2010, the actor and comedian Sanjeev Bhaskar recalled the fear which the speech instilled in Britons of Indian origin: “At the end of the 1960s, Enoch Powell was quite a frightening figure to us. He was the one person who represented an enforced ticket out, so we always had suitcases that were ready and packed. My parents held the notion that we may have to leave.”
Whilst a section of the white population appeared to warm to Powell over the speech, the author Mike Phillips recalls that it legitimised hostility, and even violence, towards black Britons like himself.
In his book The British Dream (2013), David Goodhart claims that Powell’s speech in effect “put back by more than a generation a robust debate about the successes and failures of immigration”.
“Just when a discussion should have been starting about integration, racial justice, and distinguishing the reasonable from the racist complaints of the white people whose communities were being transformed, he polarised the argument and closed it down.”
“I thought Britain would love us. But in fact it was the opposite, they hated us. So the reason I never had my childhood teenage I was frightened. I was living in fear. We never had a place to go to apart from Brick Lane.”
“… people got beaten up in streets, people used to get mugged… after work coming home by racists. Then we came into the realisation that we… have to fight back. Then all some of the young teenager we named we set up an organisation called Bangladesh Youth Front.”
“… 1978, I was 18 or 19 at the time… Then I came to know the name of Altab Ali… We organised a demonstration to march from Whitechapel St Mary’s Churchyard to Hyde Park Corner… And that was the day gave us the strength after seeing all these people supported us. All these people was chanting. ‘Here to stay. We are here, here to stay’… and there was… slogans saying ‘black and white, unite and fight. We are black, we are white, we are united.'”
“We wanted to defend our community. We wanted to show the world that Altab Ali was a very simple and innocent garments worker who was murdered by racists for no reason. He was simply working in rag trade, and on his way from work to home he was murdered.”
“We marched from Brick Lane to Hyde Park corner, we marched to House of Commons, we marched to major roads in London protesting the murder of Altab Ali.”
“… there were a huge number of people that needs to be recognised by the community, by the next generation, by the future generations, by the history that you are involved. I think these people need some recognition.”
![Chris Killip (British, 1946-2020) 'Untitled? [Shipbuilding on Tyneside]' 1975-1977](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2023/01/killip-shipbuilding-on-tyneside.jpg "Chris Killip (British, 1946-2020) 'Untitled? [Shipbuilding on Tyneside]' 1975-1977")
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