Chris Killip

Chris Killip (born 11 July 1946) is a Manx photographer who has worked at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts since 1991, where he is a professor of visual and environmental studies.

Christopher David Killip was born in Douglas, Isle of Man and in 1964 moved to London where he worked as an assistant to the advertising photographer Adrian Flowers. He soon went freelance, but in 1969 stopped his commercial work to concentrate on the photography that he wanted to do. In 1969 he moved back to the Isle of Man, photographing it extensively. The work from this time was eventually published by the Arts Council as Isle of Man: A Book about the Manx in 1980. In 1974 he was commissioned to photograph Bury St Edmunds and Huddersfield, and in 1975 he won a two-year fellowship from Northern Arts to photograph the northeast of England; Creative Camera devoted its entire May 1977 issue to this work

Killip is well known for his gritty black and white images of people and place. In 1977 he became a founder, exhibition curator, and advisor at the Side Gallery, Newcastle, and worked as its director for 18 months. He produced a body of work from his photographs in the northeast of England, published in 1988 as In Flagrante. These black and white images, mostly made on 4×5 film, are now recognised as among the most important visual records of living in 1980s Britain. Gerry Badger describes the photographs as "taken from a point of view that opposed everything stood for", and the book as "about community", "a dark, pessimistic journey".

The book In Flagrante was well received on its publication in 1988, but Killip's kind of black and white documentation of the underclass was going out of fashion quickly in Britain, as photographers used color to show consumerism and for consciously and explicitly artistic purposes. In Flagrante was reproduced in February 2009 within one of Errata Editions' "Books on Books". In a review of this reproduction, Robert Ayers describes the original as "one of the greatest photography books ever published".

In 1988 Killip was commissioned by Pirelli U.K. which thought that he might photograph its tire factory in Burton; agreement on this was reached in April the next year, whereupon Killip started work. Attempting to use available light in a darkened factory in which work was done on a black product, he was at first unsuccessful, but in June he switched to flash and a large-format camera and photographed for three more months. The resulting work was exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) in September 1989; it was published in book form by Ute Eskildsen/Steidl in 2007.

From 1992 until 2004, Killip photographed pilgrimages and other scenes in rural Ireland; the result was published in 2009 by Thames & Hudson as Here Comes Everybody.

Killip is the recipient of numerous awards, including the second Henri Cartier-Bresson Award (for In Flagrante). He has exhibited all over the world, written extensively, appeared on radio and television, and has curated many exhibitions.