By Conor Risch

In “An Irish Tale” (“Exposures,” June 2009) PDN reported on Manx photographer Chris Killip’s new book, Here Comes Everybody (Thames & Hudson). The album-style collection of photographs Killip made during several trips to two annual Catholic pilgrimages in Ireland includes the first color work he has ever published. Killip says becoming comfortable with color was a slow process.

“I didn’t start photographing in color until 1997, when Nan Goldin told me to buy myself a Yashica T4, which was $104,” Killip recalls. “What happened when I bought that was that it freed me up a little, because it was a point and shoot, but it was a sophisticated camera in the sense that the lens was very good.”

Killip began using the Yashica to make color snapshots of the Irish landscape during the week in between the two religious pilgrimages at Croagh Patrick and Mámeán, which were on successive weekends. (He was using a Plaubel Makina roll film camera to make black-and-white images of the pilgrimages.)

Eventually another photographer teased Killip into getting a Leica to make his color images. “I was cycling one day in 2000 in Ireland with my Yashica, and Tom Woods the English photographer who lives in Ireland in the summer—he’s of Irish descent—he was laughing at me saying, ‘Get a real point and shoot, Killip.’ He was photographing me from his bicycle with his Leica. And I realized he was right: you can use a camera any old way you want to. I bought an M6 and that’s the 35 millimeter camera I ended up using [to make the color photographs in the book].”

Once Killip had a camera he liked, he then had to reconcile the colors he saw in Ireland with the colors recorded on the negative. When he would get his prints back from the lab—“I like little prints not contact sheets, so I can see everything. I learned that from looking at Eggleston, he always starts with little prints so he can see everything on them”—he felt the colors were inaccurate and exaggerated. The sky was too blue, like the Mediterranean, and the grass was too vividly green.

Then Killip “went digital.” “That’s what really got me excited about the possibility of color. I started to really like scanning and the complete control you can apply in terms of the specifics of the colors of green and the nuances of green and also the blue in the sea and the blue in the sky… John Szarkowski always used to say to me, talking about the print, ‘Think of the moment. What did it actually look like? Try and get close to that.’ So in color that was a great relief to be able to calm it down a bit.”

Even after Killip was comfortable working in color, he faced other technical and logistical challenges working on the pilgrimage project.

"The problem with Croagh Patrick is that it often can be a nice day at the bottom but then it’s three thousand feet up, and often it’s very cold and wet at the top and also it’s quite a bleak and difficult place to photograph." He says of the terrain, "It’s so steep and it feels so dangerous because the ground is always giving from you, and you always think: I’ll never do this again, this is terrible, but there’s also a pleasure in it as well, it’s a strange thing."

He says the climb up Croagh Patrick became "a test of my age."

"Will I get to the top this year or will I flounder on the way? And then the strange thing is you’re going up and struggling and then you look round and there’s a farmer in his 70s or 80s, puffing a cigarette, walking past you as if he’s on a country walk."