Tyre Factory as Theatre
KILLIP, Chris. Pirelli Work. Gottingen: Steidl..2006.
Large 4to. Original grey cloth, lettered in black to front cover and spine, in photo-illustrated dustjacket; pp. [6], 7-85, [1]; minimal crease to left corner of jacket’s front panel, very slight staining to edges of jacket; a near-fine copy; three signed photographs loosely inserted.
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 became one of the UK’s most prolific Post-War photographers. His generous and democratic perspective drew attention to generally underrepresented communities. For example, for the series Seacoal, Killip took portraits of the men who would forage discarded coal, displaying the communal dignity of an overlooked group of people.
Pirelli Work is a series of photographs of workers at the Pirelli tyre factory in Burton-Upon-Trent in 1989. Alongside the realistic and intimate portrayal of the factory, stands Killip’s light and his techniques from fashion photography. As Killip wrote ‘[t]he 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’.
SKU: 2120524