Chris Killip’s 'Askam-in-Furness': A Community Seen, Remembered, and Returned
Chris Killip’s 'Askam-in-Furness' returns to the community where it was created, shown complete for the first time alongside unseen images, reopening Signal Film and Media’s Cooke’s Studios with a moving portrait of resilience, memory, and history.
When the doors of Signal Film and Media’s newly redeveloped Cooke’s Studios open this September, visitors will be greeted not by glossy contemporary spectacle but by the quiet strength of black-and-white images made more than forty years ago. Chris Killip’s series Askam-in-Furness, intimate, unflinching and deeply humane, is returning to the community where it was first created.
Killip, who died in 2020, is remembered as one of the UK’s most influential post-war documentary photographers. His work captured working-class life with honesty and dignity at a time when Britain was undergoing seismic social and political change. In 1981 and 1982, he immersed himself in the Cumbrian coastal village of Askam-in-Furness, forging connections with residents and turning their daily lives into a body of images that speak across generations.
“History is what’s written, my pictures are what happened,” Killip once said. “It’s like a people’s history, the people who history happened to.”
Pictures of a People’s History
The exhibition brings together twenty silver gelatin prints hand-printed by Killip, shown together for the first time since he exhibited them to the Askam community in 1982. Alongside them are fifty-nine newly digitised negatives and an archive installation of previously unseen photographs, uncovered in a collaborative research project with local residents.
The images, such as a boy clutching his pigeon, cows strolling past a clothes shop, or the skeletal pier at low tide, portray a community marked by industry and landscape but never reduced to either. They are full of resilience, humour and stillness, qualities Killip could only capture because he lived among the people he photographed and earned their trust.
Curator Phil Northcott, who has personal ties to the community, notes:
“While selected works have been shown internationally, the complete series has not been seen in its entirety since Chris first shared it with Askam in 1982. Our ongoing research is uncovering new stories that reveal more of his time here, and that personal history makes the work all the more moving.”
A Reopening with Purpose
Signal Film and Media’s choice to reopen its refurbished gallery with this exhibition feels intentional. Following a £1.4 million redevelopment, funded by Arts Council England and the UK Government Community Ownership Fund, the organisation wanted a project rooted in the strength and spirit of the Furness region.
For Co-Director Loren Slater, Killip’s images were the obvious starting point:
“We wanted to reopen with an exhibition that spoke to the resilience and beauty of the Furness community, in the wider context of the social and political climate of the UK. For us, it had to be Chris Killip.”
Voices of Resistance: ONE YEAR!
Running alongside Askam-in-Furness is ONE YEAR! Photographs from the miners’ strike 1984–85, a touring exhibition curated by Isaac Blease and drawn from the Martin Parr Foundation Collection. Featuring the work of Brenda Prince, Jenny Matthews, John Sturrock, Roger Tiley, Killip and others, it revisits the year-long industrial action that defined a generation.
Photographs of picket lines and police confrontations sit beside images of solidarity, from strike meetings to the tireless activism of Women Against Pit Closures. Together with posters, badges, and albums compiled by striking miners, the exhibition explores photography’s dual role as both evidence and instrument of resistance.
Returning Home
In showing Askam-in-Furness in the place of its origin, Signal Film and Media is not just honouring Chris Killip’s legacy but also returning a history to its people. The images serve as both memory and mirror, speaking as much to the present as to the past.
As Martin Parr has said:
“Chris is without a doubt one of the key players in postwar British photography. He led the way in which he would befriend the communities he photographed, and this created the intimacy and strength of his images.”
For those who knew Killip’s work, and for those encountering it for the first time, the exhibition offers an opportunity to reflect on how photography can bind communities together through memory, through recognition, and through the dignity of being seen.
Chris Killip: Askam-in-Furness runs 19 September – 1 November 2025, alongside ONE YEAR! Photographs from the miners’ strike 1984–85 from 19 September – 25 October 2025 at Cooke’s Studios, Barrow-in-Furness.
