Ask most photographers today what you need for unguarded, intimate documentary work and they'll say something small, quiet and fast. A rangefinder, a compact, anything you can raise and lower before a subject has time to arrange their face.
To say that Chris Killip went in a different direction would be something of an understatement. He mainly used a large-format field camera on a tripod, the sort of set-up that takes a minute or more to compose, focus and load before you can even think about pressing the shutter.
By any conventional logic, this is entirely the wrong tool for catching a family unguarded on a doorstep, or children mid-scramble over a wall. And yet North, the new Thames & Hudson edition of Killip's work in north-east England and Ireland between 1975 and 1986, is packed with exactly these kind of moments.
The book, edited by Mark Holborn, brings together 224 images from the period, nearly half of them previously unpublished. We get to see shipbreaking yards, the Skinningrove fishing community, and the "seacoal" campers who scraped a living gathering coal washed up on the Northumberland shore.
This is a heavyweight object in both the literal and metaphorical senses of the word. But it's also an unexpected manual in a slower, less obvious kind of documentary practice.
The trick, if it can be called that, wasn't speed at all: it was time. Killip spent extended periods actually living within the communities he photographed, most famously more than a year at the Lynemouth seacoal camp.
By the time the camera came out, his subjects had stopped performing for it long before, which meant a slow, deliberate large-format process didn't spook anyone; it simply became part of the routine of a man who was already there, day after day.
The stillness required by the camera stopped being a barrier to intimacy and became, almost accidentally, a form of respect: nobody gets photographed by someone they don't trust holding a field camera on a tripod for a full minute.
There was a technical upside to this approach too, and it's visible the moment you look closely at the prints. Large-format negatives resolve an extraordinary amount of fine detail and tonal range, which is exactly why the demolition scene at Wallsend, cranes looming over half-collapsed terrace houses, holds up at a size and clarity that a 35mm frame from the same era simply couldn't match.
Killip wasn't choosing the format for nostalgia or a particular grain; he was choosing it because it could carry the weight of what he was documenting, printed large, for decades.
The lesson for photographers today
For those of a certain age with a nostalgic outlook, it's tempting to focus on the subject matter here: deindustrializing Britain, the Miners' Strike. But I think a wider and more durable lesson, for anyone shooting portraits or documentary work today, is about the relationship between equipment and access.
A slow camera doesn't have to mean a stiff or staged picture; it just changes what kind of trust you need to build before you can use it. Killip built that trust first, for months at a time, and only then did he bring out the tripod.
Chris Killip: North, edited by Mark Holborn, is published by Thames & Hudson on September 3 in the UK, priced £75, and in the US on October 6 for $95.
