Blighty in blight

There’s such a frequent sense of heartbreak in these pictures — and it’s all the more affecting for going unacknowledged either by Killip or anyone he shows. These pictures — these people — are as immune to cheap sentiment as stone, and about as given to complaint or self-pity.

No glumness quite matches English glumness: gray and damp and confined. For that reason, perhaps, no endurance quite matches English endurance. It extends even to the natural world. In “Brussels sprouts, Gateshead, Tyneside,’’ a vegetable patch grows in front of a set of grim hoardings covered with peeling posters. In “Council house with roses, North Shields, Tyneside,’’ the effect of the flowers is rather undercut by a broken fence and gate off its hinges, both badly in need of a paint job.

Killip, who has taught at Harvard for almost 20 years, was born on the Isle of Man, in 1946. This makes him English, but not quite — an ideal situation for an observer to be in. Coincidence or no, the greatest English photographer of the 20th century didn’t come from England, either. Bill Brandt was born in Germany. And behind these photographs is the memory of Brandt’s pictures of servants and coal miners in the ’30s.

There’s a major artistic difference between them, though. Brandt’s indulgence of the theatrical couldn’t be more alien to Killip. Black (that richest and most luxuriant of tonalities) was the visual key Brandt so often composed in. He was documentary noir. Killip prefers gray. It’s a spiritual key, too. These pictures are unimaginable in color, either as art or documentation. Among other things, it would make them nearly unbearable to look at.

The gray is also meteorological. A watery ocean light fills many of the pictures. The unease with which people sprawl on the beach suggests how alien a concept leisure is in this world. The presence of the ocean is like a taunt, or even indictment — the visual equivalent of the items (seen behind a locked grille!) in “Bingo parlor’s prize window, North Shields, Tyneside.’’