First edition with extra loose photographs
KILLIP, Chris. Pirelli Work. Gottengen: Steidl Publishers. 2006.
Large 4to. Original grey cloth bound boards with black lettering; photo-illustrated dust jacket; includes three signed photograph plates loosely inserted; pp. [6], 7-85; minimal crease to left corner of front cover of dust jacket; slight staining to extremities of dust jacket; otherwise near fine copy.
First edition, with three loosely inserted black-and-white photographs by Killip, signed and inscribed to Claire de Rouen.
Born in the Isle of Man in 1946 and revered for his documentation of working-class life in the post-industrial North of England, Chris Killip would become one of the UK's most prolific Post-War photographers. His harsh but empathetic black and white perspective specifically drew attention to marginalised communities perpetually neglected from view, for example in his series Seacoal, in which he photographed men on horse-driven carts unearthing coal which had been discarded into the sea from a neighbouring mine.
Pirelli Work is a series of photographs of workers at the Pirelli tyre factory in Burton-Upon-Trent in 1989. Interestingly, most precious to the process of rendering a realistic and intimate portrayal of life inside the factory was Killip's relationship with light with Killip copying certain fashion techniques; "The main light, which was the one balanced to light the subject, was often held on a pole by my friend, away from the camera, mimicking the fashion techniques that I knew from my past. I now understood and knew what I wanted to do. The workplace had become, in a real sense for me, a theatre and I embraced the look of these new photographs with their relation to fashion, film noir, and even Soviet realism. For me this ‘look’ seemed a more telling way to record and document this enforced ritual".
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