The working class get it in the neck basically, they’re the bottom of the pile... 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 immortalised, they’re there forever. For me that was important, that you’re acknowledging people’s lives, and also contextualising people’s lives.
Chris Killip discussing his work in the Northeast of England between 1973 and 1985, from which came his seminal photobook 'In Flagrante'.
My first visit to the Baltic Gallery on the Gateshead side of the River Tyne was in 2003, the year after the gallery opened, to see Antony Gormley's 'Domain Field'. A powerful installation that moved me and established the Baltic Gallery as a leading venue for contemporary art.
Strolling in and around many life-size skeletal steel-rod sculptures was an emotional experience. Walking amongst them, it felt like those silent figures moved around me. The fact they were sculpted from the body forms of people from the area made engagement with the close to three hundred sculptures more meaningful and intimate. The people of the Northeast already appreciated Antony Gormley warmly from his 'Angel of the North'. 'Domain Field' was of and for them and tied him even closer to the sense of Northeastern community. A community recognised and encompassed within a work of art, whose recent experience at that time was of deindustrialisation and economic decline. I feel it endeared Gormley to the local people even more.
More recently, I attended the Chris Killip Retrospective at the Baltic. Through his photographic documentation of the decline of traditional Northeastern industries through the nineteen-seventies into the eighties, Chris, like Antony, also endeared himself to the people of whom he 'spoke'. I was one of some hundred thousand people who visited Antony Gormley's exhibition. From the evidence of my visit to see Chris’ work, he too is equally popular with people of all ages in the Northeast. And, given its history, the Baltic Gallery was a fitting venue for such a retrospective.
As you can see from the photo, the Baltic Gallery is an imposing building that stands proud alongside the Sage Music venue and the Tyne Bridges. However, where it stands has changed out of all recognition from what Chris Killip would have seen while photographing the decaying landscape of post-industrial Newcastle and the surrounding area—those days when it was undoubtedly grim up north.
Some twenty years after Chris captured his evocative images, only a faded, ragged glory remained alongside the banks of what was once the Tyne’s great industrial and maritime age. By then, the disused flour mill was on the brink of demolition.
The building of the Baltic Flour Mill began in the 1930s, but because of delays during World War II, production did not start until 1950 from when it produced both flour and animal feed. Alas, its life as a mill was short-lived, and production ceased in 1982. What remains today is the silo building of what was once a much bigger complex employing hundreds of people. The end of production is another symbol of the continuing decline of industry on the Tyne, as captured by Chris.
For the next ten years, there was mention of various plans to develop the site of the Baltic for apartments, offices, or a retail and restaurant area. Then in the mid-1990s, noises were heard that indicated it could become home to an Arts Venue. In 1997 those noises took form when a project overseen by the Arts Council received a significant grant to turn the site into "the biggest international visual arts centre outside London". Finally, five years later, the Gallery you see today opened its doors.
I left the Northeast to live and work in London the year after Chris first came to the Northeast and began taking his long series of photographs of industrial decline for which he is lauded rightly. I was not alone in being an ‘economic migrant’. Between the years nineteen-sixty and two thousand, the population of Newcastle and the surrounding area fell by some 20% as people moved to find employment.
In the early years of my life, I lived through the demise of northeast shipbuilding and the closing of many mines. These were harsh and dangerous industries but industries in which the people who worked within them took much pride. Sunderland people even carry the moniker 'Mackems' from the phrase "we mackem and takem", referring to the building and then the delivery of ships.
Both sets of my grandparents represented those two industries. On my father's side, it was shipbuilding; on my mother's, it was mining. So, my upbringing was in a swirl of stories of the challenges and dangers of the two. But also, tales of the camaraderie and spirit of the people who were part of the industrial engine that powered Britain's economy and, if truth be told, for little financial reward. I recall a common saying from those times: "In the North, we make things; in the South, they make money".
The pride of those who worked along the banks of the Tyne or deep underground took much wounding as the shipyards and pits closed at an ever-increasing rate in the latter half of the 20th Century. You can see the emotional pain in the faces of the people Chris captured poignantly. But Chris caught their indomitable spirit, too, and the sense of determination that they would endure. I identify closely with his photographs because I recognise how well Chris captured the character of the people I grew up amongst.
While I left the Northeast in the 1970s, the Northeast never left me. Over the early years after I left, I returned for family visits and to watch Newcastle United play. A bit like the industry of the Northeast after the 1970s, Newcastle United also suffered much trial and tribulation after their glory days earlier in the century. They share, from the 1980s to the present, apart from brief periods of resurgence under Kevin Keegan and then the late Sir Bobby Robson, the same faded glory as the old industries. I never lost my belief, though. I've journeyed back to watch the Magpies throughout my life and wherever I've lived.
However, more than those social visits was my pride when, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, the company of which I was a director decided to open an office in Newcastle. An office that was in the expanding industry of Information Systems. Building things with the clever minds of those in the Northeast, not just their creative hands. Bringing some employment back to the area of my birth meant much to me. It helped me repay some of the emotional debt I owed to a people and place that had shaped my political outlook, sense of social responsibility, work ethic, generosity of spirit and, indeed, sense of identity. As I wrote above, I left the Northeast decades ago, but it never left me.
And that was true of Chris Killip too. He lived and worked as an adopted 'Geordie' amongst those he photographed. Co-founding the Side Gallery in Newcastle as a pioneering independent venture to promote the work of documentary photographers. Sadly, he would now see some irony that, because of the economic difficulties many arts organisations face, the Side has recently closed its doors. Yet, more positively, many people have financially contributed to a fund that might allow the Side to reopen next year subject to the raising of sufficient monies.
The Northeast and its people capture the affection of many who visit and choose to live here. I felt its pull during my marital separation last year and have returned to live out the rest of my days here. As another saying from the area goes, "Once a Geordie, always a Geordie", and I think that's true of Chris Killip just as much as me.
I too was moved by Domain Field. Off to see the Chris Kilip exhibition next week.
I taught at Easington Colliery the year after the Miner's strike had finished, a southern lass, moved north for her first teaching post. So much wà a shock: the empty shops, mother's picking sea coal on the beaches, but also community & genuine friendship like I had never experienced before.