This short film documents artist John Stezaker within his London home and studio.

Brighton Beach, England, 1966.

Originally Published in Creative Camera, Issue 52, October 1968

In an era of pop commerce, and out of the gimmick-ridden world of lucrative non-art, it is refreshing to discover a photographer who – by-passing the slick ploy of self-conscious fashion cult – has an eye for What Is. His hand does not finger the lining of his pocket in anxiety to feather his roost or to create a cultural dream. His eye is discerning and his shutter response swift.

We should note that, as a photographer, he has nothing to sell. Nor does he escape into pretty trivia, he does not need gimmickry to alter reality in the darkroom – and although he may be aware of nature’s grandeur his life is with people, and he is wise enough to know that photographs do nothing to enhance a personal communion with the absolute sunrise.

Tony walks in the realm of humanity, and he discovers in the everyday more than we would always admit or accept. What he discovers in the world about him is varied and permutable. At root he captures antipodes; although his socially conscious view of liberation and suppression, anxiety-melancholy, love-hate, etc. is more obvious in his photos of America, particularly New York, where emotions burn in a heroically aged cosmopolis.

In England he finds a cooler human climate, a more subtle play in the remains of a disintegrating empire-yet ignificance in the relationship of details which at first seem disparate. With an almost cold humour we may be faced with expressions in a muscle or beauty queen contest that reflect the entangled vanities of a species time, then again we may see the surrealist absurdity in the isolation of individuals and action within a supposed community or man’s artificially contrived herd of humans; or we may gaze into a suspended world conjuring visions of an ancient race fading into space, It is within the unexpected conflict of images and in the total composition, remembering that this scene was a spontaneous instant of life, that windows through the world are opened.

Primadonna Club on Virginia Street, Reno, Nevada, 1971.

Tony Ray-Jones:

“The pictures of the U.S. were taken from 1964 to 1965. As they were not part of a project, they are now merely isolated sketches. Nevertheless I find it interesting to juxtapose them with the pictures of the English. I find the U.S.A. extremely exciting, as there is much to comment on: its negative and positive aspects, its vitality, its world-wide influence and constant change, qualities that force one to react and encourage strong statements.

The English pictures are from several personal projects taken between 1966 and 1968. I had been away for five years and came back with a foreigner’s outlook, as well as that of a native. This prompted me to concentrate on my own projects. I felt that England was unexplored photographically (from a non-commercial point of view), Bill Brandt being the only photographer to produce an honest and personal document on the English people.

My aim is to communicate something of the spirit and the mentality of the English, their habits and their way of life, the ironies that exist in the way they do things, partly through tradition and partly through the nature of their environment and mentality. I have tried to present some of these daily anachronisms in an honest and descriptive manner, the visual aspect being directed by the content. For me there is something very special and rather humorous about the ‘English way of life’ and I wish to record it from my particular point of view before it becomes more Americanised. We are at an important stage in our history, having in a sense just been reduced to an island or defrocked and, as De Gaulle remarked, left naked. Nudity is perhaps more revealing of personality than a heavily clothed figure.

Perhaps seeing the work of photographers Bill Brandt and Robert Frank, the painters Bruegel, Goya, De Chirico and Edward Hopper and also the films of Jean Vigo, Bunuel and Fellini have been more of an inspiration and given me a better education than the formal training I have had in British and American art schools. In New York Alexey Brodovitch encouraged me and gave me tremendous inspiration.

Photography for me is an exciting and personal way of reacting to and commenting on one’s environment and I feel that it is perhaps a great pity that more people don’t consider it a a medium of self-expression instead of selling themselves to the commercial world of journalism and advertising.”

Helen and Hula-Hoop, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth, Tyneside, UK, 1984 by Chris Killip

 By Richard Cork, Review of Another Country at Serpentine Gallery, September 12, 1985

Excerpt from New Spirit, New Sculpture, New Money: Art in the 1980′s

The hardship. bitterness and despair of unemployment usually seem far removed from the Serpentine Gallery’s green placidity Looking out of its windows towards Kensington Gardens in high summer, visitors could be forgiven for imagining that economic blight and urban dereliction play no part in contemporary Britain. So it is quite a shock to turn away from dappled parkland views and encounter, on the gallery walls, an uncompromising survey of life in north-east England. Chris Killip and Graham Smith, who display their photographs side by side in this powerful exhibition, call it Another Country, I can see why. The world they explore is a narrowly circumscribed one. hit by the severest effects of recession and monetarist harshness. Killip is best known for an earlier study, in the Paul Strand tradition, of the Isle of Man. His affection for the land and its people never blinded him to the toughness of ordinary existence. But now he has exchanged his native island for an altogether more desolate locale.The open skies and dignified isolation so evident in his Isle of Man photographs give way here to a sense of paralysis and futility.

 Bever, Skinningrove, 1981 by Chris Killip

A picture oft Tyneside supermarket is filled to choking-point with solid ranks of baked-beans cans, massed around a notice which promotes a ‘Heinz Beans Free Offer — “World of Survival” Wildlife Kit’. It is a grimly appropriate announcement. Life for the people in Killiph photographs is primarily a matter of getting through the day without succumbing to terminal lassitude.The sea forms a backdrop to his studies of Lynemouth and the fishing village of Skillingrove. but no one seems able to take any pleasure in it. Rocker and Rosie, buttoned and hooded against the Wind, are too tired to take much notice of the waves in the distance. Hands smeared black, they pause for breath on the journey home with a consignment of seacoal. Rosie seems resigned to a gruelling and meagre existence, and the residual strength in her weatherbeaten face suggests that she will continue to struggle for a livelihood. On Whitehaven Beach, by contrast, local youths gather in an aimless group and kill time by sniffing glue.The ritual is carried out in a desultory way, as if the sniffers themselves acknowledge its pointlessness.

But what options are open to them? Judging by Killip’s close-up study called North East Coast, the beach offers little except pollution and detritus. Broken bottles, bones and a discarded contraceptive outnumber the shells, and the mood does not shift very significantly when Killip turns his attention inland. A man carrying a child on his shoulders in Scottswood Road, Newcastle, seems at first to be smiling as he stares into the distance. But closer inspection discloses that he is contorting his face against the glare of a day which probably promises him nothing. Time and again. similar moments of apparent optimism turn out to be countered by darker considerations. Although a girl called Helen seems to be enjoying her hoola-hoop, she is obliged to play with it on a dispiriting stretch of waste ground heaped with rubbish. Elsewhere, in a photograph called New Year’s Day, a Father celebrates by cuddling his daughter in a caravan. But even here another girl, half cut off by the edge of the picture, looks on pensively as if oppressed by the knowledge that their happiness only has a momentary significance.

 Angelic Upstarts at a Miners’ Benefit Dance at the Barbary Coast Club, Sunderland, Wearside, UK, 1984 by Chris Killip

The unease is so pervasive in Killip’s work that his one scene of full-blooded enjoyment also turns out to be the most sinister in in implications. Concert, Sunderland is the terse title for an extraordinary image, where the flashlight illuminates a tangle of semi-naked figures presumably swaying to the music. One shaven-headed dancer, his ear pierced with a variety of rinp and pins, lurches to the left and bunches his hand into a fist. Another figure, stripped to the waist and baring the word ‘Angelic’ under his nipple, dives towards his neighbours like a rugby player barging into a scrum. But the photograph is dominated by a youth who leans forward and yells, braces dangling round his waist and zipper brazenly open. Two hands appear to be restraining him or preventing him from falling, and all over the picture a strange choreography of arms and fingers can be seen. Clutching, pointing, pushing and clenching, they signify a peculiar blend of intimacy and aggression. So far as I can tell, the sweat-stained boisterousness displayed here is quite harmless. But Killip’s observant and understanding eye is sharp enough to reveal the pent-up violence in these on flailing bodies — a violence which could easily erupt at a football match or a street-gang confrontation.

His co-exhibitor, Graham Smith, sometimes takes a more humorous view. Sticking to the pubs and clubs of Gina Corner, the down-at-heel area of Middlesbrough where he grew up, Smith relishes the comedy of Eddie sitting alone with a pint perched comfortably on his ample paunch. He enjoys catching his father’s aghast expression at the precise moment when Smith Senior loses a bet on the Grand National, and he encourages pub regulars to adopt theatrical poses. Realizing his camera is there, a few of them play up to it. But I preferred the photographs which do not only on people’s awareness of the watching lens to give them interest. One of Smith’s pictures bears the memorable title I thought I saw Liz Taylor and Bob Mitchum in the back room of the ‘Comical’. On this occasion, though, the drinkers in question seem unconscious of their look-alike potential. Nor does their claim need to be pressed. It is enough that Smith was on hand to record their bizarre resemblance, and his long familiarity with the neighbourhood means that they are pre-pared to accept his inquisitive presence. He even felt able to stop a couple in the street, ask the wife to hold up her giant picture of Elvis while her husband minds a pram weighed down with assorted household belongings, and then title the photograph What she wanted and who she got.

 I thought I saw Liz Taylor and Bob Mitchum in the back room of the ‘Comical’ by Graham Smith

There is a robust, music-hall cheekiness about such strategies which marks Smith out from the more austere Killip, and yet both men hang together uncannily well at the Serpentine .They share a determination to examine, with straightforward and unpretentious honesty, the everyday life of a society in sad decline.Their determination to focus only on the aspects they really now about leads them into repetitiveness, and the show could have benefited from more rigorous editing. I came across too many photographs of boozers at shabby corner tables, and abject figures slumped on benches. The photographers would probably claim that the monotony induced by these recurrent images makes its own point. But I would have preferred a pared-down selection, so that the disconcerting impact of Another Country could be registered with even greater force among the trees and flowerbeds of a more privileged England.

Seacoal. 
Photographs by Chris Killip.
Steidl, 2011.   Cat# ZE447    ISBN-13: 978-3869302560 

Here Comes Everybody. Chris Killip’s Irish Photographs.
Photographs by Chris Killip.
Thames & Hudson, 2009.   Cat# NT259    ISBN-13: 978-0500543658 

In Flagrante. Books on Books #4.
Photographs by Chris Killip. Essays by John Berger and Sylvia Grant, Gerry Badger and Jeffrey Ladd.
errata editions, 2009.   Cat# ZD562    ISBN-13: 978-1935004066 

ASX CHANNEL: CHRIS KILLIP

ASX CHANNEL: GRAHAM SMITH