No Politics by Anton Jäger && Daniel Zamora

Author:Anton Jäger && Daniel Zamora
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ERIS

What Happened

Chris Killip’s In Flagrante (1988) is made up of pictures taken over more than a decade in northern England in small working-class communities like Wallsend in Tyneside, Whitehaven in Cumbria, and Lynemouth Beach in Northumberland; their subjects are the victims of deindustrialization (either in coal mining or shipbuilding more generally). But if it is initially tempting to identify these photos with the Salgado-like project of revealing a social problem and beginning to look for a ‘solution’, John Berger and Sylvia Grant’s foreword to the volume explicitly warns against that: “photography has often been used, in a documentary spirit”, they write, “to record and to reveal social conditions . . . [to show] to the relatively privileged how the ‘other half’ lived: sub-proletarians . . . the unemployed, the homeless”, with the purpose of moving the “public to action” or of protesting “social conditions” in the hope of helping to get them “improved”. But, Berger and Grant argue, “In Flagrante does not belong to this tradition. Chris Killip is adamantly aware that a better future for the photographed is unlikely.”18 And it’s not just the pessimism with respect to solutions that distinguishes Killip’s work from the documentary; he has himself said several times that he was “not pretending to be a documentary photographer in the accepted sense”, and even that his pictures, despite the anti-Thatcherite agenda with which they are sometimes identified, are not primarily political or aimed at performing a political function. Hence the workers’ political responses to Thatcherite measures are almost absent from his work (he actually put aside almost all his photographs about the miners’ strike)19. As argued by Gerry Badger in the afterword to the 2008 edition, In Flagrante “is not intended as a ‘document’ of the Thatcher government”.20

But there is one way in which Killip’s work shares a problematic not only with Salgado but with the documentary, and especially with documentary that aspires to the condition of ‘art’. His pictures may seek no social solutions, but they do show “the relatively privileged how the ‘other half’ lives”; they are pictures of the poor made by someone who (at least by the time he was making them) was already a successful photographer and for an audience (the art world) that is not just relatively but absolutely privileged. And he himself lives in a world that has not only survived the destruction of the English miners but has thrived on it. By 1994, he was a professor at Harvard—the world’s richest university—and while the audience for his work is hardly limited to the rich, it probably includes almost no one who makes a living collecting wasted coal in northern England. So, like Salgado, he is confronted right from the start by a difference between the photographer and his subjects that is not only aesthetic but social. But (not quite like Salgado) he makes this difference central to his work. Indeed, his collection Arbeit/work begins (before we are presented with any photographs, except the one on the cover)

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