Chris Killip: Retrospective (The Photographers Gallery)

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 Fotomuseum Den Haag in The Hague, where such an overview was brought to German and Dutch audiences for the first time. 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 each UK exhibition, record audiences of over 100,000 visitors were achieved, with the Gateshead exhibition in the Baltic Art Centre drawing wide community access. Public events to complement the Frankfurt and Hague exhibitions extended debate about Killip’s contribution and the development of documentary practices today. Grant spoke in London, in a presentation streamed to international audiences and the exhibition was widely appreciated in industry journals and wider media.