[music featuring acoustic guitar]
Chris Killip: I’m following a parade in the West End of Newcastle, which is a poor, rundown part of Newcastle. It was some street parade, and I was walking with it and I stopped. For one second, I saw him. I had my cameras round my neck. It’s the big plate camera. I’ve already set the focusing distance, and I took one image, went click, and walked on.
[music ends]
Female Narrator: Photographer Chris Killip.
Chris Killip: It’s sort of strange. Often, when I’m photographing a place that I know well, I sometimes take a better picture of someone who comes into that scene that I know less well or don’t even know at all because I think I see them more clearly. I don’t see them as my friend, or the people that I know, or the person that I maybe even don’t like that much. They have no baggage. I see them just as a visual thing with no preconditions.
The irony of that is, sometimes the people I like very much, I don’t get a picture that I think does them justice. Because I know so much about them, I want that picture to be so good, that it’s hard to get that picture. And sometimes when you don’t know anything about somebody I’ve found that sometimes you get a picture more easily.
[music featuring acoustic guitar]
Female Narrator: But Killip still believes in being part of their environment.
Chris Killip: You’re going to get a picture by being there. It’s never easy. And, also, you’re just so attuned sometimes. Sometimes you’re good and they’re good.
I’d never seen them before and I never saw ‘em again.
[music ends]