Last updated: April 10, 2024
The Last Ships
Laing Art Gallery, New Bridge St, Newcastle NE1 8AG
Permanent
Free
Gigantic freight ships built in the 1970s were part of the last of any ships built near Wallsend and South Shields. Chris Killips collection of photographs – The Last Ships, lay bare the scale of the Tyne Pride, in particular, in various stages of construction, it’s scaffolding and exposed decks seem like carefully arranged matchsticks on a pond.
Only when other photographs with houses, street lamps and people are viewed alongside such almost technical photographs does the scale truly become apparent. The ships, the cranes and dockside apparatus put very clearly in context that this wasn’t a fringe project at the end of the river but it was entire river, its landscape, its streets, its roads and its people.
The anatomy of a ship is hypnotic as it is unfamiliar and these photographs, along with most of the others, are brilliant in their combination of soft monochrome textures with harsh plunges into consuming darkness. No condescension of warm tones or the fakery of icy hues is on display here, just the brutal there-it-was daily presence of a massive engineering project literally at the end of the road.
For feeling grounded in the magnificent everyday you can’t go around this exhibition and feel anything else. In this age of the fancy aerial shot or worse, the sensor-timed camera at night shot (yuk), there is always merit at playing to photography’s greatness strength: its sense of being there, at the place where one could imagine oneself standing. This exhibition is free of the gimmicks of looking up or down oddly and just looks, dead ahead at the sloping street or the shop on the corner.
With the social aspect just out of view in most cases I cannot help feel a part of these photographs are missing something. Sure the ships are the stars and is it not vanity to suggest that any human is more impressive on film that a gigantic ship under construction? For all the wonder of the last gasp of the industrial age these photographs of the ships show off (shipbuilding ceased shortly after) it is the social aspect that saves these photographs from being grey and pretty versions of blueprints, at least to non-engineering eyes.
The shop on the corner with its giant Oxo billboard and Lyons Tea window branding you might think is the most obvious example here of a contrasting subject. But it suggests kitsch and a quaintness that does not ally with the heavily politics of the 1970s and suggest 1940s or even 1950s, a ghostly timelessness that hung around the area that was about to end.
Two photographs place the 1970s well and are more social commentary than shipbuilding and yet very much belong in the room despite being very different to the ship pictures. The first is the naive way children stare at the camera taking all the construction in their stride, they play in the company of big open ships.
The second is the snowy street, two adults staring at the camera this time, no hint of self-consciousness, they stand apart from the graffiti on the opposite wall that reads “Dont vote. Prepare for revolution”. Did they or didn’t they? Perhaps they were just too busy building very big ships to avoid the coming storm.
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