Christopher David Killip was a Manx photographer who worked at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1991 to 2017, as a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award for his book In Flagrante published in 1988 with its text by John Berger and Sylvia Grant. He exhibited all over the world, he wrote extensively, appeared on radio and television, and curated many exhibitions.
In 1977 he became a founder, exhibition curator, and advisor at the Side Gallery, Newcastle, and worked as its director for 18 months. If you don’t know his work, you need to seek it out.
As part of his contribution to our weekly A Photographic Life podcast, photographer Daniel Meadows spoke of Killip. His work and his approach, his importance and his relevance.
To mark Killip’s recent death we have edited those comments from the original podcast and include them here as a thank you to Killip for leaving us with such a powerful and important body of work.
Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Taylor Francis 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Taylor Francis 2019). His next book What Does Photography Mean to You? will be published in November 2020.
© Grant Scott 2020
So true!! Such a brilliant photographer.
A fine tribute to the work of Chris Killip from Daniel Meadow’s recent contribution to your podcast, Grant. Chris Killip’s work, and his work ethics, remain as benchmarks to me and, I am sure, very many others in the craft of social documentary photography.
Thank you