By Conor Risch

Returning to the same area in the west of Ireland ten times over the course of several years to photograph two Catholic pilgrimages allowed Manx photographer Chris Killip an opportunity to study the yearly rites and establish his own photographic narrative. "It's quite interesting to go back to the same place, the same ritual, because there's this theatricality," says Killip. "You know what is going to happen, so you can anticipate actions, and it just depends: How good are you on the particular day, and then how good are they, the people, on the particular day?"

Here Comes Everybody: Chris Killip's Irish Photographs, new this spring from Thames & Hudson, is "a facsimile of an album" Killip created out of the images he took of the pilgrimages at Croagh Patrick and Mámeán, intermixed with images of the Irish landscape. The book includes Killip's first published color photographs.

Killip, raised Catholic, first traveled to Ireland in 1991 to teach a summer workshop on the Aran Islands, and he first made images there in 1993. Killip says he had been hesitant to go to Ireland because Czech photographer Markéta Luskacová, the mother of his son, and Josef Koudelka, a friend who introduced the two, had both photographed there. "I felt that it was not my 'territory,'" Killip writes in his introduction to the book. Killip was unaware at the time that he did, in fact, have roots in the country. On his way to Ireland in 1994, Killip stopped in to see his mother on the Isle of Man. She told him then that his grandmother had been from the west of Ireland. His mother, "Molly" Killip, who "did play her cards close to her chest," he relates, said no more about it. The knowledge changed the experience of photographing in Ireland, Killip says, "in the sense that you'd often stand and look at something and wonder, 'Did they come from here?'"

The two pilgrimages took place at the beginning and the end of a week at the end of July, and Killip spent the days in between making color photographs of the landscape with a Yashica T4, an informal point-and-shoot with a good lens that allowed Killip to get over his inhibition about shooting color. Soon he upgraded to a Leica M6. Killip had been photographing the pilgrimages on black-and-white roll film with a Plaubel Makina, but he eventually started to take color images as well. His final trip to Ireland was in 2005.

In creating the book, Killip chose to crop the black-and-white images to match the color photographs. Images from the pilgrimages sit on the left-hand pages and the landscapes occupy the right-hand pages. All of the white-bordered photographs are sized slightly smaller than standard 35-millimeter prints. "Religion and belief as a subject is rather a lot to chew on, so for me the album and the snapshot and the postcard were a very good form of delivery," says Killip. "You're after something quite large, but you're going modestly about it. I'm not trying to say everybody in Ireland is religious, far from it, and I'm not saying religion isn't without its problems, especially in Ireland. But also in Ireland the Catholic religion has affected everybody in one way or another, so it is part of the culture."

The two events engaged Killip for different reasons. At Croagh Patrick, Killip relates, 20,000 to 25,000 people make the pilgrimage on one day. "It is like everybody is there, that's why the title had interested me, Here Comes Everybody [a reference to James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake], because it is rather like Croagh Patrick," Killip says.

"The interesting thing is how everyone is welcome and you can't second-guess other people's reasons for doing it. There's something quite wonderful about that," he says.

Mámeán, a much more local event that Irish photographer Tony O'Shea told Killip about, draws only a few hundred people and is organized by a priest O'Shea described to Killip as "fierce." "He wants it to be sublime, this thing," says Killip. "It's a very serious event for him."

"There's a very beautiful moment where the priest talks about everybody in the area who died that year, and he has something to say about them," Killip recalls of Mámeán, "and even though I can't understand it—it's all in Irish—it's still very moving because you think it would be so nice to be remembered in this way. It's all about community and togetherness."

See PDNOnline this month for more from Chris Killip about his new book.