Chris Killip (1946-2020)

FATHER AND SON WATCHING A PARADE, WEST END, NEWCASTLE, 1980. Silver gelatin print, printed 1988, image size 342 x 260mm, sheet size 505 x 405mm, signed and dated '88' by the photographer in pencil verso. Framed, frame size 545 x 450mm.

“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

In 2017, on the occasion of Chris Killip's exhibition "Now Then: Chris Killip and the Making of In Flagrante" (Getty Museum, May 23–August 13, 2017), the British photographer spoke to Laura Huber about his career photographing the working class communities of Northern England in the 1970s and 1980s. Huber asked Killip about the process of capturing one of the most arresting portraits in his landmark book In Flagrante (Secker & Warburg, 1988) -- the photograph of a son on his father's shoulders in Newcastle, watching a parade.

"I was following a parade in the west end of Newcastle, which is a poor, run-down part of Newcastle. It was some street parade, and I was walking with it, and I stopped. In one second, I saw him. I have my camera round my neck, the big plate camera. I've already set the focusing distance, and I took one image -- went click, and walked off. It's sort of strange -- often, when I'm photographing a place I know well, I sometimes take a better picture of someone who comes into that scene who I know less well, or don't even know at all, because I think I see them more clearly. I don't see them as my friend, or people that I know, or a person maybe even I don't like that much - they have no baggage. I see them just as a visual thing, with no pre-conditions."

Provenance:

From the Private Collection of Film Director Michael Caton-Jones