Photographer Chris Killip: return to a ritual landscape
Continuing her series on photography books, Liz Jobey looks at Chris Killip's affectionate portrayal of Irish pilgrims
guardian.co.uk , Monday 20 April 2009 17.18 BST
Máméan, Co. Galway, by Chris Killip Photograph: Chris Killip/Thames and Hudson
In 1988, when Chris Killip published In Flagrante , his book of photographs made in the north-east of England between 1976 and 1987, it was no coincidence that its dates fitted neatly within those of Margaret Thatcher's terms as leader of the Conservative party and then as prime minister. In 1988 she still had two years left in office, but her transformation of the country was pretty much complete. She had deregulated the financial system, broken the unions, legalised the sale of council houses, cut back the welfare state and shifted the national agenda from a belief in social responsibility to the pursuit of individual wealth.
Here Comes Everybody: Chris Killip’s Irish Photographs Thames & Hudson, £29.95
She had also divided the country economically, north from south. In the north-east, where mining, shipbuilding, iron and steelmaking had supported communities for generations, the closure of pits and shipyards left families stranded by sudden unemployment. The poorest families were pushed to the margins. To look at just one image from Killip's book, a picture of a boy and his mother in a pony-drawn cart after a day scavenging for coal washed up by the tide ( "Rocker and Rosie Going Home, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth, Northumberland", 1984 ), is to see not just the desperation of one family, but to recognise an entire social landscape. Since then, the book has become one of the most admired in British photography , and Killip's reputation has continued to grow, as has the sense of anticipation, from photographers and fans alike, about what he will publish next.
In 1991 he moved to America to teach at Harvard, where he is now Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies . Between that year and this, apart from a series of photographs made at the Pirelli tyre factory in Staffordshire in 1989 , he has not published another book of photographs. So this book, Here Comes Everybody, is the first collection of new work published in almost twenty years. The title comes from Finnegans Wake (one of its main characters, HCE, goes by the nickname "Here Comes Everybody"and his sins and resurrections run throughout the book). This nod to Joyce makes a fitting title for a book which is essentially about a gathering of believers.
In a brief introduction, Killip explains that in 1991 he was invited to teach a summer photography workshop on the Aran Islands, which lie off the west of Ireland where Galway Bay meets the Atlantic. Two years later he went back, intent on making his own photographs. He returned in successive summers, his dates book-ended by two annual Catholic pilgrimages, one at Croagh Patrick, in County Mayo, on the last Sunday in July; the other at Máméan, in County Galway on the first Sunday in August. In between, he drove around the countryside, as far north as Tory Island in Donegal and south to County Cork, taking pictures. This book, which began as a record of those trips, is the result.
Leaning into the hillside grimacing... Croagh Patrick, Co Mayo by Chris Killip Photograph: Chris Killip/Thames and Hudson
In layout and design it is a facsimile of an album made up of photographs from these trips taken between 1993 and 2005; some are in black and white; others are in colour; all are reproduced as postcard-sized prints. A single black and white image is in the centre of each left-hand page, and opposite it are colour pictures placed singly, in pairs, or sometimes four to a page. This simplicity is disarming at first. The black and white pictures seem like little more than snapshots of his fellow walkers as they make their way up into the mountains. The colour shots include the kind of subjects we would all take on an Irish holiday, of green fells and cloudy, wind-blown skies. But there is nothing amateurish about these precise compositions, or serendipitous about their arrangement. They have a palpable sense of aesthetic reasoning that forces us to look at them seriously both as single images and as constituent parts of a whole.
The book provides two parallel narratives. On the left-hand side, in black and white, the pilgrims make their way up and down the mountains. Some have children with them, others are barefoot, doing penance. Many carry wooden staffs for support, and as the climb becomes steeper they lean into the hillside, grimacing and pause for breath. It soon becomes clear that the purpose of these photographs is more symbolic than documentary. These mountains were sacred long before Christianity arrived in Ireland, and the figures – often given a ghostly bleaching by the mist and rain – suggest the generations of pilgrims who have made the same journey up and down them over thousands of years.
On the opposite pages, meanwhile, the colour pictures, like superior picture postcards, chart the simple visual pleasures of the Irish countryside: its narrow, empty roads, strange natural rock formations, distinctive dry-stone walls with "gates" of loosely stacked stones; its painted rural shrines, whitewashed cottages, rocky causeways, and children swimming off concrete jetties or diving from forbidden rocks. There is nothing forced in the postcard aesthetic here, since the pictures contain – and transmit to the viewer – a real enjoyment of the country and the people that inhabit it.
Spilling into colour... The View of Clew Bay from the summit of Croagh Patrick, Co Mayo by Chris Killip Photograph: Chris Killip/Thames and Hudson
Gradually, the two narratives become interdependent. A group of four colour pictures of the same isolated cottage, each time more derelict than before, with its thatched roof balding and its whitewashed walls going grey, are placed opposite a black and white picture of two men, one old, one young (almost certainly father and son). The young man walking just behind the old one, with a hand laid gently against his back. Though it might sound overtly mechanistic, in the flow of pages it is just one example of the subtext of ageing and renewal and the enduring landscape that runs through the book.
As the pilgrims reach the climax of their journeys, they spill over on to the right hand pages and into colour: their anoraks pink and green and blue, their cheeks ruddy and wet. At Croagh Patrick they crowd into the chapel at the top of the mountain. At Máméan they stand together on the hillside while the rites are sung in Irish by Joe John Mac Con Iomaire (whose fine, clear voice can be heard on a YouTube clip ).
What comes across most strongly is the photographer's genuine affection for the people and their rituals and for the countryside around them. Killip has said in the past that one of the chief driving forces behind his photographs is "an interest in beliefs, my own and other people's".
Killip is a Manxman and has always been closely associated with the island. In the introduction to this book, however, he explains that in 1994 (he was by then in his late forties) his mother told him that he was a quarter Irish. She had been raised by her Irish mother as a Catholic in a community of Primitive Methodists on the Isle of Man and had suffered so badly from their prejudice that she had never talked about it with him before. This fact, which might be regarded as just an accident of genealogy, seems to have ratified Killip's link with the place he already felt so strongly emotionally drawn to. The pictures in the book will probably not be what people are expecting. As he wrote in an email recently: "A lot of the pictures were taken just for pleasure, as a souvenir to commemorate the joy of being in this particular place at that moment".
