Chris Killip
[Photographer, b. 1946, Douglas, Isle of Man, United Kingdom, lives in Boston.]
I don’t like smiley pictures. A smile is a defense mechanism. It says, “You can’t have the real me but here’s my smile.” You get closer to the real person when they stop smiling.
I take what isn’t mine and I covet other people’s lives.
I wanted [photography] to be more than a document, to be something that is as close as you could possibly be to the subject.
The moment you make a photograph you consign whatever you photograph to the past as that specific moment no longer exists, it is history. The photography that I practice takes place in a specific time and place, depicting real moments in people’s lives. In some ways I think of myself as a historian, but not of the word. History is most often written from a distance, and rarely from the viewpoint of those who endured it.
