Saturday, November 6, 2010

Chris Killip: 4 & 20 Photographs Opening Friday November 12th 6- 8 pm

Couple eating fish & chips, Whitley Bay, Tyneside, 1976

Chris Killip

4 & 20 Photographs

Howard Yezerski Gallery proudly presents the work of Chris Killip, one of the most influential photographers to have come from Great Britain. 4 & 20 Photographs will be Killip’s first one-man exhibition in the USA.


Click here to read the fantastic review of this show from November 30th's Boston Globe by Mark Feeny. 

Killip’s work is widely praised as the most acute depiction of the human cost to Britain’s process of de-industrialization. The twenty-four images in this exhibition, from 1974-88, are primarily from the North of England and cover the tenure of four very different Prime Ministers: Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, Jim Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher.

“The term ‘poetic document’ to describe Killip’s work has perhaps never been more apt, for as Ian Jeffry has written, Killip would seem to be no programmed sociologist, nor even much of a social observer. ‘He is, rather, suggests Jeffry, a storyteller, concerned primarily with the fabric of things, of life lodged in matter. However his sense of one is completed only by a sense of the other. “ (Gerry Badger, The Photobook, Vol 2)

Chris Killip was born in 1946 on the Isle of Man. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Henri Cartier Bresson Award, and his work is featured in the collections of major institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The author of five books, including the highly acclaimed In Flagrante, 1988, which was reproduced by Errata Editions in their series on the photo-book in 2009. He is a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University where he has taught since 1991.

In 2012 Killip will have a retrospective exhibition of his work curated by Ute Eskildsen at the Folkwang Museum in Essen. Many of the images that will be included in the retrospective, as well as in this exhibition, have never been exhibited or published before.


The blog Prospero, on the website for the Economist magazine, had a review of Killip's work on November 10th. The entry stresses the iconic scenes portrayed in his photographs of industrial Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. Click here to read the review. 

Father and son watching a parade,
West-end of Newcastle, Tyneside, 1980
4 & 20 Photographs was previously showing at Amador Gallery in New York before coming to Howard Yezerski Gallery next week. Killip was mentioned in The New Yorker Magazine Gallery Notes in their October 18, 2010 Issue:

"It's hard to believe that this great British photographer is only now having his first solo exhibition in the U.S. Like Bill Brandt and Martin Parr, Killip casts a sharp, unsentimental eye on his fellow-citizens and their environment. The photographs here, made mostly in England's bleak northern cities between 1974 and 1988, when more and more people were out of work, are among his toughest and most affecting. Never operatic, Killip is a master of ordinary despair: amid a flurry of windblown trash, a man in an overcoat stands facing a brick wall chalked with a tiny bit of graffiti proclaiming "true love."


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