Chris Killip: Retrospective (Deutsche Boerse)

The exhibition Chris Killip Retrospective comprising of over 140 photographs, represents the first comprehensive survey of the photographer’s career through his photographic prints. From its first iteration in London’s Photographer’s Gallery, the exhibition travelled to Gateshead, UK, where many of the photographs were originally taken, before installation at Deutsche Boerse, Frankfurt and, later, Fotomuseum Den Haag in The Hague. The retrospective exhibition served as an introduction to the photographer's work for a German audience who, other than one exhibition at Folkwang Essen in 2012, had been unable to view the work of a photographer whose influence on British and some European practices was notable. This iteration was accompanied by an installation design that included geographical locations to make clearer the footprint of the work and the regions Killip engaged with. The exhibition again 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 each UK exhibition, record audiences were achieved, with the Gateshead exhibition in the Baltic Art Centre drawing wide community access. Public events to complement the Frankfurt exhibitions extended debate about Killip’s contribution and the development of documentary practices today. Public events included curator's tours and an invited guest 'in conversation' between Director of the Deutsche Boerse organisation and Curator at International Centre of Photography, New York, David Campany.