He sent 20 images to the gallerist Augusta Edwards shortly before he died, for example, so that his photography could be exhibited alongside Graham Smith’s in 2022, the first time since their celebrated 1985 show, Another Country, at the Serpentine Gallery in London. For the next few years, Killip worked at night in his father’s pub and, by day, travelled the island shooting his first series of landscapes and portraits. The island had become a tax haven for outsiders and Killip rightly sensed that its traditional jobs were under threat. He set out to evoke that disappearing way of life and, in doing so, set the tone for much of what was to follow, not just in terms of his choice of subject matter, but in his formal rigour and deeply immersive, slowly evolving approach. To celebrate the In Flagrante‘s reprint, as well as the Yossi Milo Gallery show that accompanies it, TIME LightBox asked photographer Martin Parr– an avid collector of Killip’s prints – to discuss the book’s legacy and rebirth with its author.

Born in Douglas on the Isle of Man, Killip worked as freelance commercial photographer in the 1960s, before turning to documentary. In 1975 he was granted a two-year fellowship to photograph in the north-east and the first evidence of how important his images were came in May 1977, when Creative Camera magazine devoted an entire issue to his work in progress. Sarah Kent in a review said of the Youth on Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1976, ‘This image personifies Thatcher’s Britain’,” he tells me. “I wasn’t worried about that, Harold Wilson was Prime Minister when I took that picture. Thatcher had nothing to do with it! Everyone then stared to refer to Thatcher, though there were four prime ministers while I was photographing. Rather than trying to pin all the blame on Mrs Thatcher, I was trying to pin the blame on all politicians, if that was what I was trying to do. And I wasn’t. I was just trying to say that these people are part of history, these [events] are historical facts.” In Flagrante means ‘caught in the act,’ and that’s what my pictures are. You can see me in the shadow, but I’m trying to undermine your confidence in what you’re seeing, to remind people that photographs are a construction, a fabrication. They were made by somebody. They are not to be trusted. It’s as simple as that.” —Chris KillipThe zines in question are a set of four tabloid-sized, unbound newspapers Killip co-published with graphic design studio Pony in 2018. They include The Station, made from a set of photographs shot at a co-operative punk venue in Gateshead in 1985, and Skinningrove, shot in the preceding four years in a small fishing village on the North Yorkshire coast. I carried that film around like it was gold. Then, when I finally got it developed, I was like, ‘What? What was he thinking?!’” she laughs. “There was no iconic photo I could print and say, ‘This is our wedding.’ It was people talking, people caught biting into food. Chris Killip: After living in the U.S. for 25 years I don’t think that it’s likely that I will ever return to Britain to live but I very much enjoy visiting and do so two or three times a year. He moved to the US in 1991, having been offered a visiting lectureship at Harvard, where he was later appointed professor emeritus in the department of visual and environmental studies, a post he held until his retirement in 2017. In the summer of 1991, he was also invited to the Aran Islands to host a workshop and returned to the west of Ireland a few years later to begin making a body of colour work that would be published in 2009 in a book called Here Comes Everybody, its title borrowed from James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake.

You’re going to get a picture by being there. It’s never easy. Sometimes you’re good and they’re good…I’d never seen them before and I never saw them again.” —Chris Killip Chris Killip: My camera’s very visible. It’s big. And there’s something good about this, where you have to deal with the fact that I am a photographer and I am here. Look at this great big contraption. It really took me 20 years to understand what he was seeing. There’s no filter, there’s no posing, there’s none of that, ‘Let’s prepare for the moment to be photographed.’ There’s the minimum there could be between the photographer and what’s happening. It’s as raw and real as possible, and looking through the images, I feel like I’m there.”Father and son, West End, Newcastle: ‘Today’s poverty may look different but you hope that someone with as keen an eye as Killip is capturing it.’ Photograph: Chris Killip/Steidl Martin Parr: You have said before that you would never re-do In Flagrante. What made you change your mind? The Bobby Sand image with the graffiti “Bobbie Sands greedy Irish pig” was taken on the day Mrs. Thatcher announced his death and, hopefully, serves the book well with its historical/political/social context. We’re discussing his work in England’sNorth East from 1973-1985, images from which made up his seminal photobook In Flagrante. Released in 1988 and showing communities reeling from the effects of de-industrialisation, it was immediately hailed as a classic – and read as a statement against Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister most identified with the process of de-industrialisation. In fact Killip has long been at pains to reject that reading, pointing out in In Flagrante Two, published in 2016, that he actually shot his images under four Prime Ministers, “Edward Heath, Conservative (1970-1974), Harold Wilson, Labour (1974-1976), James Callaghan, Labour (1976-1979), Margaret Thatcher, Conservative (1979-1990)”. LH: So, in the photographs where intimate stuff is happening, the people aren’t really looking at you, necessarily. They’re just going about their lives. Do you then wait for the moment that you want? Do you let life just happen?