Chris Killip: In Flagrante: Books on Books No. 4

Chris Killip's "In Flagrante" is often cited as the most important photographic book on England in the 1980s. Published in 1988, this work portrays the steady decline of communities in Northern England--former manufacturing powerhouses that were gradually compromised by the policies of Margaret Thatcher and her predecessors from the mid-1970s onward. Killip's black-and-white photographs were mostly taken with 4 x 5 film, and provide an unflinching look at these disenfranchised northern towns and the poverty visited upon them by deindustrialization. "Books on Books" No. 4 reproduces Killip's lyrical work alongside John Berger and Sylvia Grant's original essay plus a specially commissioned essay, "Dispatches from a War Zone," by acclaimed photo historian Gerry Badger, which explores the social context in which Killip's evocative images were made.