Chris Killip, From Within
On the eve of the second anniversary of the Parisian gallery space Le BAL, the Chris Kilip exhibition What Happened established a distinction between History, a posterior construction whose legitimacy comes from its distance from the actual event, and “what happens,” a subjective narrative of the event as it was experienced by the protagonists themselves. Chris Kilip miraculously manages to find a halfway point, fragile but real, between these two modes of capturing time.
After spending months immersed in several communities in the North of England (Lynemouth beach, the town of Skinnigrove, the Tynneside shipyards), which saw in the 1980s the disintegration of their glorious industrial past, Chris Killip became one with the people he photographed. He knows everyone by name and takes on the local accent. He tells stories of Sunday mornings on the beach after the pub closes, of the Orangemen tattoo on the arm of man who works on the docks (forbidden to Catholics), of the tenants who burned their houses down in order to be relocated, and of the victorious voice of Margaret Thatcher on the radio announcing the death of Bobby Sands.
At the same time, his abstract and oddly cold visual language excludes all pathos, all pity, all fascination. Killip points toward to the tragedy (of life) without the drama (of language).
One thinks of the Wallace Stevens poem quoted by David Chandler in his fine article on Paul Graham:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself:
And here I found myself more truly and more strange.
(From Tea at the Palaz of Hoon, 1923)
Diane Dufour
What happened – Chris Killip
Le Bal
From May 12th to August 19th 2012
6 impasse de la Défense
75018 Paris – France
