Pirelli Work By Chris Killip

Chris Killip’s 1980s photographic study of the Pirelli tyre factory, documenting the process of industrial manufacture using only the available light.

“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, 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.” Chris Killip

Essay by Clive Dilnot.

Steidl, 2006
h285 mm x w267 mm
88 pages
Hardback

£40.00

Pirelli Work Steidl, 2006 Chris Killip

7 in stock

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