The Station was a dedicated performance and rehearsal space established by The Gateshead Music Collective after their previous venue was threatened with closure. The Collective, together with community and youth workers, lobbied Gateshead Council and with help from the Council’s Library Services, successfully applied to The Prince’s Trust for funding to buy equipment and to refurbish the space.
‘In 1985 I was photographing nightlife venues in Newcastle when someone told me about The Station in Gateshead. I was amazed by the energy and feel of the place. It was totally different; run for and by the people who went there. I stopped going to other venues to photograph there on Saturday nights. Nobody ever asked me where I was from or even who I was. A thirty-nine year-old with cropped white hair who always wore a suit, as the jacket had pockets stitched inside of it to hold my 4×5” slides. With a big flatbed plate camera around my neck and a hefty Norman flash, with its outsized battery around my waist, I must have looked like something out of a 1950s B-movie or some rather oddball imitation of ‘Weegee the Famous’. – Chris Killip
‘1985 wasn’t a great time in Gateshead. It was after the miners’ strike and a lot of the punks at The Station were unemployed. This place, run as a very inclusive collective, was part of their identity in the way it affirmed their self-worth. As a venue it was unique, members of local bands, who weren’t playing that evening, were in the audience dancing.’ – Chris Killip
A majority of these images of raw youth caught in the heat of celebration had lain dormant in Killip’s archives for more than 30 years, until rediscovered by his son, filmmaker Matthew Killip in 2016; they now return to life in this book.
The exhibition “The Station” at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, UK scheduled for 25 March – 23 May, 2020 has been postponed.
Chris Killip (b. 1946 in the Isle of Man) left school at the age of 16 and went on to pursue a career in photography. In 1964 he was hired as the third assistant to photographer Adrian Flowers before working as a freelance assistant in London from 1966-69. After seeing his very first exhibition of photography at the MoMA, New York, he returned to photograph in the Isle of Man. New York gallery owner Lee Witkin, commissioned a limited edition portfolio of this work, paying for it in advance so that Killip could continue to photograph. In the following years, he was founding member, curator and advisor for Side Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and its Director from 1977-9.
In 1989, he received the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award and in 1991 he was invited to teach at Harvard University and became chair of the Visual and Environmental Studies Department in 1994. He retired from Harvard in December 2017 and continues to live in the USA. His work has been the subject of numerous international solo exhibitions and is held by significant collections including MoMA, New York; George Eastman House; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum Folkwang, Essen; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate, London; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. His books published with Steidl are Pirelli Work (2006), Seacoal, (2011), Arbeit / Work (2012), Isle of Man Revisited (2015) and In Flagrante Two (2016).
- Chris Killip: The Station
- Text by Chris Killip
- Book Design: Pony Ltd., London
- 200 pages
- 11.5 x 15 in. / 36.4 x 28.8 cm
- Hardback / Clothbound
- US$ 85.00 / € 75.00
- ISBN 978-3-95829-616-9
