Chris Killip, Tyne Pride at the end of the street, Wallsend, circa 1975–77. Archival inkjet print on Baryta paper, 12 × 15 in. © Chris Killip. Given by the artist in honor of all the shipyard workers of Tyneside, 2017.

Chris Killip’s black-and-white photograph Tyne Pride at the End of the Street, Wallsend (circa 1975–77) looks down a street receding into the near distance. The houses flanking it on both sides form lines that lead the eye toward the middle of the frame, a classic use of single-point perspective. An enormous ship looms up and fills the center, while three children in the foreground emphasize the ship’s scale. The photograph presents a strong geometric order—the trapezoidal shapes of the houses and the street interlock with the ship, blocking out all but a narrow band of overcast sky. While the even light across both sides of the street in the lower half of the frame produces a calming lack of contrast, the darkest black of the ship punches out a solid shape against the clouds. Its gently sloping curve reveals the glimmer of a striated landscape in the distance—a slice of river, the hint of the shipyard on the other side, and the sky above. In an image of solid masses dominated by a monumental object, the rush of activity crammed into this sliver of space disturbs the pictorial order.

The photographs collected in Killip’s exhibition The Last Ships, at Newcastle’s Laing Art Gallery, often strike their audience with blunt force.¹ Viewed from afar, they resemble modernist collages of hard-edged planes. Although the pictures focus on the built environment around the shipyards of Newcastle, Killip’s arrangements consistently include non-industrial elements—sometimes a landscape, but more often a figure. In fact, there is hardly a photograph in The Last Ships that does not represent at least one person, lending a human quality to a series that examines the decline of the shipbuilding industry on the River Tyne.

Chris Killip, Looking West from Camp Road, Wallsend, 1975. Archival inkjet print on Baryta paper, 16 × 20 in. © Chris Killip. Given by the artist in honor of all the shipyard workers of Tyneside, 2017.

Killip took these photographs while living in the area between 1975 and 1979, and during this time he helped establish Side Gallery, a local space “dedicated to showing the best in humanist documentary photography” by “telling stories that often get marginalised.”² This commitment to humanism, and to storytelling, sets The Last Ships apart from much of the other photographic work done on industrial landscapes during the same period, from the isolated water towers of Bernd and Hilla Becher to Lewis Baltz’s stark images of Southern Californian warehouses. Killip himself is invested in the people that appear in his work, and he donated the photographs of The Last Ships to the Laing, Newcastle’s municipal art gallery, “in honour of the shipyard workers of Tyneside.” The series hangs matted and framed in a gallery for which admission is free of charge.³ These workers appear throughout the series, sometimes in photographs that show the shipbuilding process in great detail. But the mere fact that workers are represented here does not necessarily indicate meaningful solidarity between the artist and his subjects, or make the photographs politically useful. What matters is whether Killip tells their stories.

Killip made his first series of photographs in the early 1970s on his birthplace, the Isle of Man, and this work established human relationships as the basis of his practice. This series, published in 1980 as The Isle of Man: A Book About the Manx, oscillated between pastoral landscapes and intimate portraits. In one photograph, for example, a woman with arms folded looks back at Killip’s camera, while the photograph on the facing page shows rolling fields mottled by sun and shadow. The portrait is tightly cropped around the woman’s torso, and the hills are shown beneath a generous stretch of open sky, so that across the two pages the viewer is first pulled in close and then pushed away. The book opens with a text by Killip that is not an artist statement but rather a letter addressed to his cousin. “Stanley, my friend,” he wrote, “the people in this book are not theories, or victims, but your neighbours, our friends. You never left your island, I did. You live with it, and I want to change it.” ⁴ The epistolary form establishes an intimate relay of relationships between the photographer, his cousin, and their neighbors and friends in the photographs. Killip appears to trust that his own relationships will keep the people in his community from becoming “theories, or victims” in the face of their circumstances, namely the rush by outsiders to buy up land from local residents after the Isle of Man became an offshore tax haven for Britain’s industrialists.⁵ His later work in Newcastle also dealt with a major economic shift, but he was not able to photograph there with the same degree of familiarity.

Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907. Photogravure, 13 1/8 × 10 1/2 in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Collection. Photo: Don Ross.

The art critic John Berger published a text in The Isle of Man that praised Killip for the social qualities evident in his work, even as it drew attention to Killip’s somewhat retrograde method of working. Berger called Killip “a persistent, obstinate artist,” describing him as “[u]ninventive, repetitive, using the solutions of fellow artists—notably Paul Strand.” ⁶ Indeed, the 32 photographs on display in The Last Ships were shot on black-and-white film with a 4×5 camera. This bulky, precise instrument requires a tripod and a slow and deliberate demeanor; the painstaking compositions that it encourages connects Killip to turn-of-the-century efforts to establish photography as a legitimate pictorial art, like those of Strand and Strand’s mentor, Alfred Stieglitz. Killip’s attention to form places his work in dialog with this modernist approach in which photographers maintain a careful personal distance from their subjects. Stieglitz’s 1907 photograph The Steerage is exemplary of this modernist attitude. It depicts a scene on a ship in which a gangplank visually divides first-class passengers from those crowded in steerage on the deck below. The real pictorial interest in the photograph is the series of lines running through it: the ladder to the right, with its doubled handrail; the ship’s boom at the top of the frame; and the stanchions and chains that run down the gangplank, which is itself a linear element. Most of the activity in the picture happens on its extremities, where these lines run into the photograph’s edges. The center lacks movement—people simply fill up the space. Stieglitz himself would later describe The Steerage as a “picture based on related shapes and on the deepest human feeling.” ⁷ In this cool, modern attitude toward photography, the outside world exists as a source of formal combinations, and this arrangement of visual elements stands in for the humanist empathy of the artist. While Stieglitz’s “human feeling” manifests in abstracted masses of people, Killip’s own form of humanism appears in his careful attention to the relation between his subjects and their local environments.

Chris Killip, End of Terrace Housing, Wallsend, n.d. Archival inkjet print on Baryta paper, 16 × 20 in. © Chris Killip. Given by the artist in honor of all the shipyard workers of Tyneside, 2017.

The industrial (or deindustrializing) landscape of Newcastle was no Isle of Man; instead it offered hard edges and building blocks to piece together. This urban topography dictated a visual language of brutal rectilinear forms, yet Killip reconciled this persistent formalism with his interest in people by including human figures in otherwise graphic compositions. In this way, The Last Ships combines the contrasting landscapes and portraits of The Isle of Man into single photographs: here, the oscillation between figure and ground doesn’t play out across images but within them. The lack of any close-up portraits at the Laing makes the exhibition somewhat unusual within Killip’s career—he returned to portraiture in much of his later work—yet human figures are scattered throughout the photographs. In End of Terrace Housing, Wallsend (circa 1975–77), six planes intersect just off the center: a brick house, the sidewalk in front of it, two roads paved with distinct textures, a brick retaining wall, and, behind it, the side of another immense ship. The focus of the composition is a solitary signpost, which is neatly aligned with the edge of the building and connects all of these surfaces along its axis. But Killip isn’t content with the purely formal resolution that this selection of industrial and man-made elements provides. We also see a woman in the foreground, standing in a doorway and looking down the street and out of the photograph. Off in the distance, three figures clearly visible on the deck of the ship (a closer look reveals around ten more people taking a break on deck) unsettle the photograph’s formal rigor and remind us that the ship, too, is a lived environment.

In the foreground of Everett F Wells Under Construction, Swan Hunter Shipyard (circa 1976), four men stand with their backs to the camera alongside a large propeller. They look up and to the right, where another worker, almost in the center of the frame, sits on the ship’s rudder. The vertical form divides the photograph into two halves; on the right side, two more men stand dramatically against the sky on opposite ends of a walkway held up by wires that run to a crane outside of the frame. In a photograph that might be a companion piece, Boy Looking into Swan Hunter Shipyard, Wallsend (circa 1976), we again see workers on a suspended walkway, along with a child peering over the edge of a wall. A street sign here ties the workers and child to a specific place.

Killip was hardly the only photographer examining the built environment in the mid-1970s, but the presence of human figures sets his work apart from that of his peers. If The Last Ships appears old-fashioned now, it was outmoded even when it was made: Killip’s photographs came after New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape, a landmark exhibition held in 1975 at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. The work in the New Topographics exhibition, which featured photographers such as Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Stephen Shore, examined tract housing, industrial architecture, and urban sprawl through precise views that depict this decidedly un-classical terrain in the manner of the most elegant landscape photography. These hermetic photographs rarely include people. For example, the unromantic photographs in Baltz’s 1974 book The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California stand quite apart from Killip’s shipyard pictures. Baltz examines the other side of deindustrialization; here we find the clean, orderly photographic counterpart of the new information industry. Like Ed Ruscha’s deadpan typologies of Southern California buildings, Baltz frames each of his pictures in a dispassionate, straight-on style. The captions that accompany these austere photographs, printed in English and German, follow a basic formula: a cardinal direction, building name, street address, city. Baltz provides specificity here, but it is almost parodic in its detail: it is not connected to people but rather to bureaucratic systems of classification. East Wall, Nees Turf Supply Company, 38T Pullman, Costa Mesa (1974) corresponds to a photograph of a nondescript segmented wall. The photograph is almost entirely white: the shade of the wall is only slightly darker than the overcast sky above. A weed starting to climb the base of the wall and a gutter provide the only visual intrigue, if one can call it that.

Chris Killip, Demolished housing, Wallsend, August 1977. Archival inkjet print on Baryta paper, 16 × 20 in. © Chris Killip. Given by the artist in honor of all the shipyard workers of Tyneside, 2017.

Critic and photographer Allan Sekula, who was a contemporary of both Killip and Baltz, once joked that Baltz’s work belonged to the “‘neutron bomb’ school of photography: killing people but leaving real estate standing.” ⁸ In his writing, Sekula launched multifarious attacks on the practice of art photography; his targets ranged from Baltz all the way back to Stieglitz, for whom he reserved special scorn. Across his essays of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sekula claimed that meaning does not inhere within photographs themselves, but is instead determined by the discourses in which they circulate. As a critic, Sekula was highly attentive to the ways in which all sorts of photographs could be assimilated to the discourse of art, and thus presented with the illusion of distance from social conditions. Lewis Hine was an especially important case for Sekula, given that his photographs of child laborers in American factories had been used in pamphlets arguing for labor law reform. Despite this, Sekula acknowledged that even Hine’s work was “embroiled in an expressionist structure”; his work came to be touted by art institutions as the product of a visionary genius.⁹

The stakes of Sekula’s analysis was nothing less than photography’s very political utility: “I will say it again: the subjective aspect of liberal esthetics is compassion rather than collective struggle. Pity, mediated by an appreciation of ‘great art,’ supplants political understanding.” ¹⁰ In stridently arguing against such aestheticization of the working class, Sekula might just pull the rug out from under Killip. Despite Killip’s stated intentions to the contrary, his work could end up abstracting the people he photographed as much as Stieglitz’s maritime pictures. Sekula’s analysis begs the question of whether Killip’s photographs in fact turn his subjects into “theories, or victims.” ¹¹

Lewis Baltz, East Wall, Nees Turf Supply Company, 38T Pullman, Costa Mesa, from the portfolio The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California, 1974. Gelatin silver print, 6 × 9 1/16 in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Carol Campbell Wenaas. ©

Just as Killip’s address to his cousin Stanley indicated a specificity to his photographs on the Isle of Man, The Last Ships is grounded in the local environment of Newcastle. Indeed, at the Laing, someone might turn to you and talk about the history of this particular shipyard, in which their father and grandfather had worked. Wall labels describe the historical conditions of the Tyneside shipyards, and an inexpensive newsprint publication reproducing many of Killip’s photographs is on sale in the gift shop downstairs. Topography isn’t concerned with place names; Killip’s work is closer to cartography. Sekula himself knew this years ago: in the acknowledgements for his book Fish Story (1995), he thanked Killip “for the beginnings of a cognitive and affective map of the Tyneside.” ¹² Such cartographic specificity can be found in The Last Ships. Text appears frequently, sometimes on ships (TYNE PRIDE) or as graffiti on walls (DON’T VOTE—PREPARE FOR REVOLUTION). The same street sign (Gerald St.) appears in four photographs. In the final one, taken in 1977, the houses are not just abandoned but literally broken down and burnt-out; the sign is practically all that survives. Rubble fills the street, and it appears that this landscape has finally erased everyone within it. But on the right side of the image, hidden but still visible against the ruined wall, the solitary figure of a man appears.

With Killip’s series such as The Isle of Man, and his later photographs made in small coastal communities in England’s North East, he has built a body of work marked by close and careful engagements with individuals. The Last Ships is something of a departure for the artist. Even though it was not made in the strictly formal mode of his modernist predecessors, or with the dispassionate gaze of his peers, his eye is trained primarily on the built environment rather than people, and his storytelling is not grounded in the intimate relationships that would facilitate a specific, personal address. In recent years, Killip has given photo lectures in which he tells stories about the people he photographed and their responses to his work. He warmly recounts, for example, that he gave the mother of someone who had died suddenly an album of photographs of her child. Yet The Last Ships is one of the few works about which Killip can’t tell a story with a proper name. In this light, it makes sense that Killip gave this series to Newcastle’s public gallery. The exhibition was scheduled to close in December 2018, but it has been extended indefinitely. This fact, too, seems appropriate for a body of work that is in the process of finding the people to whom it belongs. The potential remains to complete the promise of Killip’s epistolary mode, in which his work might actually produce community—not just represent it, much less offer it up as an aestheticized object of pity.

Daniel Abbe is studying the history of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles; his research focuses on photography in Japan in the 1970s.