Chris Killip: Isle of Man Revisited

by Chris Killip (Photographer)

British photographer Chris Killip was born at his father's pub on the Isle of Man in 1946; 18 years later he left his post as a trainee hotel manager to pursue photography full time, photographing the island's beaches. He moved to London shortly thereafter, but decided to return to the Isle of Man early in the 1970s to document its inhabitants, landscapes and disappearing traditional lifestyles. The series was first published in 1980.
Thirty years after the publication of Isle of Man , Killip found himself reexamining the negatives from the series in preparation for an upcoming retrospective in Germany. "I hadn't had an occasion to think about this work since the first edition of the book was published," writes Killip. "Going through these negatives again I found new images that I now liked, but at the time had overlooked or had not used for reasons that now mystify me." These alternate Isle of Man images--some 250 in total--became what Killip terms his "Isle of Man archive." Chris Isle of Man Revisited , a lavish, large-format, clothbound volume, maintains the order of the classic 1980 photobook but with some key some of the original photographs have been replaced by unseen ones from Killip's "Isle of Man archive," and 30 new images have been added.

96 pages, Hardcover

First published October 5, 2015

About the author

Chris Killip is widely regarded as one of the most influential British photographers of his generation. Born in the Isle of Man in 1946, he began his career as a commercial photographer before turning to his own work in the late 1960s. His book, In Flagrante, a collection of photographs made in the North East of England during the 1970s and early 1980s, is now recognized as a landmark work of documentary photography. Other bodies of work include the series Isle of Man, Seacoal, Skinningrove and Pirelli.

In 1991 Killip was invited to be a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University. In 1994 he was made a tenured professor and was department chair from 1994-98. He retired from Harvard in December 2017 and continued to live in Cambridge, MA, USA, until his death in October, 2020.

His photographs feature in the permanent collections of many major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum Folkwang, Essen; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Reviews

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned about Chris Killip at a retrospective exhibition at the Photographer’s Gallery London. This book shows his skill at portraiture and landscape photography equally, many of the spreads include a portrait on one side and a landscape (or building, or an empty room) on the other. The portraits are posed but in the subject’s environment, often workspace. Killip in the introduction notes he worked as a fashion photographer’s assistant, so it’s not surprising he would pose the subjects. Overall beautifully seen and printed.