[music featuring acoustic guitar]
Female Narrator: This image opens the plate sequence of Chris Killip’s In Flagrante, a book of fifty carefully selected photographs that Killip took of Northern England over more than a decade.
[music ends]
Chris Killip: In Flagrante comes from a legal term, in flagrante delicto, which means caught in the sexual act. It’s used in divorce cases, usually, where someone's been photographed in bed with somebody else. So, I’ve just taken the delicto out and in flagrante is then just caught in the act, and that’s what my pictures are.
Female Narrator: The title may describe the subject, but it also describes the photographer, who catches himself in the act.
Chris Killip: You can see me in the shadow, but I’m trying to undermine your confidence in what you’re seeing. Photographs are a construction, a fabrication. They are not to be trusted. It’s as simple as that.
[music featuring acoustic guitar]
Female Narrator: The photograph also implicates the viewer. We stand in the photographer’s shadow as well, so close to the subject that our presence grazes her toe.
Alternate views of this image appear at the beginning and end of In Flagrante, which Killip hopes will serve as a reminder that images are inevitably subjective.
Chris Killip: It’s about reminding you that the photographs were authored by a very dubious person (laughs). All narrators are unreliable. I just want to remind people of that.
[music ends]
