A Chris Killip and Graham Smith retrospective from the 70s and 80s captures an absence of hope still felt today
An old man walking between rows of terraced housing and, behind him, the sky erased by the huge bow of a ship being built. A teenager picking coal on a beach. A man manoeuvring his horse and cart around a car dumped by the sea. A young girl playing hula-hoop in a desolate, rubbish-strewn landscape.
Chris Killip and Graham Smith’s photographs, mostly of the north-east of England, in the 1970s and 1980s, the era of deindustrialisation, of smashed communities and broken lives, look like images of a different world. Two exhibitions opened last week in London showcasing their photography, one a retrospective of Killip’s work, the other a recreation of a joint exhibition, Another Country, first shown in 1985. They raise questions both of the nature of photography and of our perceptions of working-class lives.
