Chris Killip: Retrospective (BALTIC)

The exhibition Chris Killip Retrospective comprising of over 140 photographs, represents the first comprehensive survey of the photographer’s career through his photographic prints. The exhibition drew on an archive of prints Killip sanctioned as his legacy. Working in collaboration with Tracy Marshall, who managed the exhibition production, Grant drew on the archive, associated artefacts kept by Killip, to examine and articulate the development of the photographer’s practice into a foremost commentator of an era of deindustrialization in Britain. Key inclusions included early work made in the Isle of Man, with other rooms housing installations of Killip’s Seacoal and Skinningrove series’. A further section, ‘In the time of In Flagrante’, examined the construction of Killip’s use of narrative distinct from other representations of class and politics made during the Thatcher era. The exhibition served to foreground Killip's efforts to value and document the lives of those affected by the economic shifts in the North of England, throughout the 1970s and 80s whilst it proposed conversations about the potential for photography of such circumstances to successfully exist in the gallery context. At the Baltic, a record audience of over 100,000 visitors was achieved, drawing wide community access. The exhibition was adapted from its original showing to foreground photographs from the Northeast of England, particularly around aspects of deindustrialisation in the region (with reference to shipbuilding and mining) a shift that served to elicit greater engagement from non-traditional arts audiences. The exhibition was widely appreciated in industry journals and wider media.