Pirelli Work

Chris Killip, born on the Isle of Man in 1946, is a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University where he has taught since 1991. His works are held in the permanent collections of, among others, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; George Eastman House, Rochester; the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum Folkwang, Essen; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate, London; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. His books include Isle of Man (1980), Pirelli Work (2006), Here Comes Everybody (2009), Seacoal (2011) and arbeit/work (2012).

I wanted to show the manufacturing process as clearly as I could, and to do so in this factory meant it would have to be lit. Ironically, my stubbornness in trying to avoid lighting would now have its own unexpected rewards. Because of the desperate amount of time that I had spent there, I knew in a visual way the processes of the factory; the rhythms and cycles of the machines, the movement and steps that the operators had to take, the movement that the processes predetermined for them. I began again, re-photographing the factory using lights, sometimes three or four lights triggered by remote control devices. 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 theater and I embraced the look of thesenew photographs with their relation to fashion, fi lm noir, and
even Soviet realism. For me this "look" seemed a more telling
way to record and document this enforced ritual.
Chris Killip