“I wanted to record people's lives because I valued them.

I wanted them to be remembered.

If you take a photograph of someone they are immortalized, they're there forever.

For me that was important, that you're acknowledging people's lives, and also contextualizing people's lives.”

Chris Killip

Chris Killip is widely considered to be one of the most influential British photographers of his generation. Born in the Isle of Man in 1946, he began his career as a commercial photographer before turning to his own documentary practice in the late 1960s. His book, 'In Flagrante', a collection of photographs made in the northeast of England during the 1970s and early 1980s, is now recognized as a landmark work of documentary photography. Other bodies of work include the series 'Seacoal', 'Skinningrove' and 'Pirelli'.

In 1991 Killip was invited to be a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University. In 1994 he was made a tenured professor and was department chair from 1994-98. He retired from Harvard in December 2017 and continued to live in Cambridge, MA, USA, until his death in October, 2020.

His photographs feature in the permanent collections of major institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum Folkwang, Essen; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.