British photographer Chris Killip was born at his father's pub on the Isle of Man in 1946; 18 years later he left his post as a trainee hotel manager to pursue photography full time, photographing the island's beaches. He moved to London shortly thereafter, but decided to return to the Isle of Man early in the 1970s to document its inhabitants, landscapes and disappearing traditional lifestyles. The series was first published in 1980.
Thirty years after the publication of Isle of Man, Killip found himself reexamining the negatives from the series in preparation for an upcoming retrospective in Germany. "I hadn't had an occasion to think about this work since the first edition of the book was published," writes Killip. "Going through these negatives again I found new images that I now liked, but at the time had overlooked or had not used for reasons that now mystify me." These alternate Isle of Man images--some 250 in total--became what Killip terms his "Isle of Man archive." Chris Killip: Isle of Man Revisited, a lavish, large-format, clothbound volume, maintains the order of the classic 1980 photobook but with some key changes: some of the original photographs have been replaced by unseen ones from Killip's "Isle of Man archive," and 30 new images have been added.