From Monochrome to Monochrome

We went back to Gateshead last week. What we hadn’t fitted in to our previous day out was a trip to the Baltic, to see the retrospective exhibition showing the work of Chris Killip.

Here is a man who dedicated his working life, as a photographer working exclusively in monochrome, to recording the ordinary lives of people living in disadvantaged communities, mainly in the North of England, and latterly the North East. He gained their trust by living amongst them, witnessing their communities, their friendships, their day-to-day lives. He assembled an unparalleled collection of photos documenting the effect of the economic downturn which devastated those communities, particularly during the 1970s and 80s. These photos remain as powerful today as they were then. You can read about this exhibition, and see some of the images he took, here. The account in this edition of the Guardian is of the same exhibition as we viewed, which was shown in London before moving to Gateshead.

Woman views Father & Son watching a Parade, Newcastle, Tyneside, 1980.
Woman views Scene in Skinningrove, 1984.

And I’m showing some of the photos I took as I spent time at the exhibition for this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge #265: Black and White or Monochrome.

And outside, it was business as usual for the Millennium Bridge, the Sage, and the River Tyne.

The header photograph shows visitors to the Baltic viewing the scene from an upper floor.

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Author: margaret21

I'm retired and live in North Yorkshire, where I walk , write, volunteer and travel as often as I can.

49 thoughts on “From Monochrome to Monochrome”

    1. I think they worked well too. I did a few in colour to start with and ended up converting them. Good to know you have an annual northern pilgrimage. That far north, or does it include parts of Yorkshire?

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  4. Aren’t we cosmopolitan these days, Margaret? They make a fabulous subject matter and if I’d had just one more day in the north east I’d have gone there. Funny to think that I lived through those times and they didn’t feel all that grim. My grandad, who I never knew because he died young, worked down the pit but I was lucky never to live in a pit village.

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    1. I guess he focussed on the people he saw in the streets, which might not have been your family. And I imagine some villages came off much better than others, even then.

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    1. Well, thank you Peter. That was indeed timely. I’m beginning to enjoy taking photography just a little -and only a little – more seriously. But when I have a (virtual) encounter with the likes of Chris Killip and Andrew Sleigh, I realise I’m only just playing. Which is fine at our age I think. We’ve done our bit in the Hard Graft department, you and me!

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    1. I thought you’d like to ‘meet’ him if you hadn’t already. Thanks for an extremely serendipitous challenge. It’s only a couple of weeks since a friend took me in hand and insisted I tried my hand at monochrome.

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  11. I’m glad you devoted a post to the Chris Killip exhibition. I’m such an admirer of his work, especially the Skinningrove series. And because he works in B&W it’s fitting that you’ve chosen that for your shots too. I think the colours of the visitors’ clothing etc would jar next to his images.

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    1. Quite. I took one or two, just to see. Just … nah. The only one I liked was a straight shot of CK’s image of the man with his toddler on his shoulders, with a burnt red sort of colour wall behind it.

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  14. It doesn’t matter which city I’m looking at, photos from the 1970s always astonish me with their grimness. How could they be in my lifetime? As you imply to Jo, we didn’t live in those areas – but how could I not have noticed, even as a self-absorbed teenager? Anyway, your own images are great and do the subject justice.

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    1. Thank you. As children, even teenagers, I guess we accepted our own world as being normal, and hardly recognised the possibility of an alternative. City centres then were grimy perhaps, but not necessarily grim.

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  15. I have been seeing some photos from the 70s on another blog that I follow and find it weird to see how old fashioned they appear, especially seen in black and white. I don’t recall it grim, though confess that I left the country very early on in that decade. And I do remember the strikes. I love your photos of the people looking at the exhibition. Very well observed.

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    1. Thanks Jude. I was variously in Manchester, Portsmouth and then back up north in the 70s, and my memories are not of grimness. But even as a student and then a young woman developing a career, I wasn’t exposed to real deprivation.

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      1. The nearest I got to it was in the late 80s and 90s when the coal mines closed around Doncaster. I was a trainer in several mining communities where people suffered great hardship.

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  16. Atmospheric in b/w and captures the retro. Yes, time to go further north for some of that ‘It’s baltic’ weather but perhaps ‘It’s Ibiza’ now! We have family in Sunderland but terrible admission to never having visited Newcastle.

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  18. Thank you for introducing us to Chris Killip – never heard about him up here. What a treasure his photos! Your images are great, Margaret, love especially the first one, but people watching galleries make good pictures. Hope you will go on with B&W and monochrome now that you have started out successfully.

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    1. Thanks Ann-Christine. With my friend – and now you – to nag me, I don’t have much choice 😉 . Killip’s work is well-worth exploring I think.

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