To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability, precisely by slicing this moment, and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. ~Susan Sontag
By Suzanne Révy
There is a small town that cannot be seen from the main road, but it is there. Down a valley toward the edge of the land lies Skinningrove on the northeast coast of England. In the early 1980’s, photographer Chris Killip documented this tight-knit fishing community with a deft and compassionate touch. Salt hangs in the air and soft light reflects off the North Sea, filtering through his black and white silver gelatin prints in “Skinningrove 1982-1984”, currently on view at the Howard Yezerski Gallery through June 4th, 2019.
The seaside town of Skinningrove is remote and isolated. Fishing and mining were the main industries there in the early 1980’s, requiring tough, physical labor that was clearly manifested in a weariness of the people that Killip met, got to know, and photographed. Bringing an empathetic eye to the working classes of his native England, Killip has created a record of a particular time and place that might have gone unnoticed without his presence and knack for building trust with his subjects. Killip himself grew up in a remote place, on the Isle of Man, which made him less of a foreigner to the cultural and social landscape of Skinningrove, but he was still an outsider. His introduction to the people of this town required patience, but he developed an ally with an outgoing young fisherman named Leslie Holliday. In time, the town grew to accept Killip and his camera. Many of the pictures are quickly captured vignettes of everyday activities on the streets, beaches and hillsides of the town, but Killip made posed portraits of groups and single figures as well, creating a series of pictures with profound depth, breadth and understanding.
Through the centuries, time seems to have slowed in this isolated part of England, replaying scenes through generations. Kids playing outside, dogs wandering through the town, teenagers hanging out despite the cold and blustery weather, and the undulating lines and textures of wooden boats stranded in a harbor at low tide, all bathed in soft northern light. These mundane scenes recall genre painting of the 18th and 19th centuries, yet Killip’s pictures also reveal the march of time and contemporary influences from the outside. In several images, one tall lanky lad sports a mohawk haircut popular in the London punk scene of the late 1970’s and his friends are clad in the trendy fashions of the early eighties.
Fishing and a respect for the North Sea, however, are the life blood of this place. Killip explains, “Fishermen of Skinningrove believe the sea before them was their private territory, theirs alone.” It is, in fact, the only place where the town can be seen in its entirety from a distance. But the sea has taken its toll, and we learn that four people in the pictures, including Leslie Holliday, drowned in it. The townspeople express their abiding respect for the ocean through rituals such as returning to the sea after someone is lost to it. In one aching photograph, we see a young boy being rowed out to sea just after his father and brother had drowned, to insure he grew up without fear of the water. During this wordless rite, the boy internalizes the natural rhythms of the tides, how they ebb and flow and how water can both sustain and take life.
Killip last photographed in Skinningrove in 1984, which is, in fact, not so long ago, yet the pictures have taken on a historic significance that could not have been anticipated when they were made. He returned twenty-six years later to find a town that “seems to be a pale imitation of its former self,” with only one working fishing boat left. The land and the tides may be eternal, but economic pressures have changed the nature of the work and people in Skinningrove. As Killip observed, “a photograph is a record of a death foretold.”
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