Chris Killip, Seacoal

Seacoal

Chris Killip

Publisher
GwinZegal / Steidl
Year
2011
ISBN
9783869302560
Specifications
28 × 23 cm
111 pages

Nearly thirty years since Chris Killip portraited, for a year and a half, the work and life of coal collectors in Lynemouth, sharing their daily existence. These photographs are now brought together in an exhibition and a monograph co-edited by Steidl and GwinZegal. These images transport us to the heart of the caravan camp of this community on the margins of society, showing their faces, the gestures of their work, their exhaustion. The concept of the book and the exhibition Seacoal constructs a detailed narrative from the wealth of shooting material; the sequential succession as well as the juxtaposition of images allow him to describe all the facets of a precarious existence. In this way, it is a different book, much more narrative than his famous photographic essay In Flagrante (1988), in which, alongside many other images of the north of England, we also find fifteen photographs taken from the Seacoal project. Based on fifty photographs taken between 1975 and 1987, Chris Killip sketched, in In Flagrante, the face of an era marked by the economic and social depression of this region, which followed the decline and privatization of traditional heavy industry and mining. Thus, the narrative form he uses is associative and formal; the protagonists of the images, nameless and without origin, are there not for themselves but as archetypes of a variety of destinies, or, sociologically speaking, of a given class. These images could be described as allegories, like characters on a theater stage, which would be those of destinies and passions. It is from this, in addition to the quality of the images, that the book In Flagrante draws its abstract power...

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