The Online Photographer

I meant to do more reading up on Chris Killip, who we mentioned last week, but I'm in a mindflurry of all-EV-all-the-time and I haven't gotten around to it. 

As I understand it, though, he was a Manxman, i.e., born on the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea, and, for starters, couldn't get away from there fast enough. He moved to London. But when he quit commercial photography to concentrate on his own work, he went back—his first book, 11 years later, was Isle of Man: A Book about the Manx. Then, when he was afforded a variety of opportunities to photograph the Northeast of England, he moved to Tyneside, which is a built-up area on the river Tyne, approximately here:

You know, Hebburn, Jarrow, Houghton-le-Spring, Chester-le-Street, Blydon, Ryton, Longbenton, Cleadon, Throckley, in there. :-)

His masterpiece, In Flagrante, was published in 1988 from all the work he did in the Northeast of England. Then, three years later, he really bugged out: moved to the USA. He was appointed to a post at Harvard University, and lived in Cambridge—the one in Massachusetts—for the rest of his life. For a dozen years or so he returned, fairly regularly it would seem, to Ireland, where he produced color pictures which seem rather "postcard-like" relative to his darker, closer, more intimate, more opinionated Tyneside work. The Irish-landscape "Here Comes Everybody" pictures (from the title of the book, which was not a masterpiece) show only flashes of personality and point of view. (Although the submerged pool is an exception. It's not that the Here Comes Everybody pictures aren't good.) As far as I can tell—and like I say I haven't looked into it all that much—he never made a body of work in Cambridge, Mass., or indeed in America. 

So that's a conundrum, isn't it? He rather famously did what we would now call "embedded" himself in Tyneside, living not alongside but amongst the people. But he seems to have been more of a tourist in Ireland. The point is that in all that getting away—from the pub his parents ran in the Isle of Man, from Tyneside, from the UK—he also essentially removed himself from ready access to the subject matter that made him famous. 

It's not like this is uncommon. The opposite, actually. Most photographers' peak periods are relatively limited, because truly dedicated photography is hard—really hard—and the rewards are diffuse and typically not terribly remunerative. Weegee's Naked City period didn't actually last very long; Robert Frank's high period as a stills photographer describes a bell curve with long tails; Cartier-Bresson essentially gave up photography for the last quarter of his life. Who was it who said that artists tend to have a peak period of no more than ten years, although truly great artists might have two or even three such periods?

As an aside, this is rather oddly echoed in emblematic cultural periods as well. They don't last as long as we think. They're evanescent rather than enduring. The "Wild West" essentially only lasted from the end of the Civil War in 1865 till the Census Bureau (?) proclaimed the end of the American frontier in 1890. That's only 25 years. We've been making movies about it for more than four times that long. Although the mob was active before and after, the high period of the classic 1930s Midwestern gangsters—John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde—lasted virtually only two years. The peak of the railroads was maybe 20 years, from 1890 to 1910. From the time the Beatles came to America till they broke up was only about six years. The average NFL career is 3.3 years. In all such things we tend to assume that "the way it was" lasted longer and was more enduring than it really tends to be. We pay more attention to the outliers, the high points, the "iconic" accomplishments, the most vivid characters. It's surprising how many photographers follow that template as well. Their careers describe an arc, and the peak—what we know them for, what we remember—is often not long. 

Back on track, though—Chris Killip seems to be symbolic of a peculiar problem for photographers, which is that we need access to our subject matter. Ansel Adams traveled back and forth to Yosemite from San Francisco, and as he got older he did less mountain climbing and more darkroom work. Sally Mann's kids grew up. Great bodies of work are often, in effect, "moments," short periods of time in which everything comes together: the right subject, the right artist at the right time in her own development, the right cultural moment. Shakespeare's peak period lasted essentially 11 years, from 1595 to 1606. The cultural moment was ripe for it: theater was at the very apex of its popularity and importance; the average Londoner, according to Malcolm Gladwell, went to the theater three times a week. A mere 36 years later, in 1642, Oliver Cromwell banned the theater as being sinful and frivolous, a ban that lasted for quite some time and even resulted in some theater buildings being torn down. What chance would Shakespeare have had in that cultural moment? 

Well, I'm not back on track yet, am I? That's the problem of writing off-the-cuff essays. Anyway, the point I am drifting toward is simply that Chris Killip, in escaping his roots and following his career, also cut himself off from what he got famous photographing. You could argue that the cultural moment for hard-hitting documentary work in black-and-white, up close and gritty, was passing as well by 1988–91, or you might argue that Killip had done what he wanted to do and didn't need to do any more. In Flagrante, considered one of the great masterpieces among British photobooks, was enough. But this is something I'm thinking about a lot as I contemplate moving back to the Midwest. I've found a subject here, and if I leave, no more Finger Lakes landscapes. I'll be effectively ending that body of work. I'm not sure that matters to anyone except me. But it matters to me. 

I haven't poked around enough to know what, if anything, Chris Killip might have commented about this conundrum in his own life and work. Surely someone asked, somewhere along the way? I hope I'll hear, someday, somehow. Probably he considered that the color Irish pictures were fine, that they were on a continuum with his earlier work, and that living in Boston wasn't an impediment. That's the way artists are. It's always about what we're doing now. 

Mike

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