Lot 51: Rocker and Rosie going home, Seacoal beach, Lynemouth, Northumberland, 1984

Rocker and Rosie going home, Seacoal beach, Lynemouth, Northumberland, 1984
Gelatin silver print, printed 2007. 38.1 x 47 cm. (15 x 18 1/2 in).  Signed, titled and dated in pencil on the verso.

  Martin Secker & Warburg ltd., Chris Killip: In Flagrante, 1988, pp. 14-15 and cover

 Acquired directly from the artist

Killip’s Rocker and Rosie Going Home, Lynemouth (1983) was taken at a seacoal gatherers’ camp at Lynemouth, Northumberland, where Killip lived and photographed regularly in 1982-4. The seacoal was not a natural harvest, of course, it was part of the waste jettisoned by a National Coal Board pit and washed ashore. The sea separates coal from the waste. With favourable winds, tides and currents, the coal washes ashore at the seacoalers’ beach. Their difficult and chancy trade fascinated Killip and won his admiration—as he won the trust of his subjects. Killip exhibited 70 of the ‘Seacoaler’ photographs at Side Gallery, Newcastle in the early months of 1984. Rocker and Rosie Going Home was on show when Britain’s most testing struggle of loyalties since the General Strike of 1926 had just begun. The Great Coal Strike ran from March 1984 to March 1985, dividing families, communities and the nation at large. Killip’s photographs show affection, achievement and aspiration at the most marginal place in the western economy.
Mark Haworth-Booth, Photography: An Independent Art - Photographs from the Victoria and Albert Museum 1839-1996, V&A Publications, 1997, p. 171