Mark Holborn, the editor who shaped Chris Killip's seminal 1988 photobook In Flagrante, has returned to the photographer's archive to build a new 300-page book, North, published by Thames & Hudson at £75.

When Holborn first turned the pages of the finished volume, the experience startled him. "I got an enormous charge off the book yesterday when I looked at it," he says. "It's almost visceral for me." He had seen proofs and PDFs throughout production, but never the physical object. "It's like playing an album for the first time. You sit and go from beginning to end."

The stakes exceed the routine completion of another photobook. Holborn first worked with Killip almost four decades ago on In Flagrante, published by Secker & Warburg in 1988 and now regarded as one of the defining photobooks of Britain's post-industrial era. Killip died in 2020. His son, Matthew, gave Holborn full access to the archive, including photographs the editor had never seen alongside those he has known for most of his adult life.

"For this one, I have a sort of duty," Holborn says. "Killip is not here. To be given the keys to the archive is a privilege, which I have to qualify. I want to do him justice. This is not about the projection of my own fantasy of the North. It's about my loyalty to him."

North is neither a conventional retrospective nor a collection of greatest hits. It comprises 224 photographs, many previously unpublished, arranged in a single extended sequence. It arrives less than four years after Thames & Hudson's Chris Killip 1946–2020, conceived alongside an international touring exhibition and organised around the breadth of Killip's individual projects. That book, Holborn says, "will serve historians well in the future" — but his own editorial principle runs almost inverse to it.

"I was trying to find a structure that could contain a single flowing narrative," he says, "because that is what interests me and that is the way I work."

Project boundaries dissolve in consequence. Seacoal, Skinningrove, Huddersfield and photographs made across the North East meet within one flow, framed by early pictures from Killip's native Isle of Man and later images of pilgrimages at Croagh Patrick and Máméan in Ireland — what Holborn calls "stepping stones or border crossings" into and out of the sequence.

Holborn deliberately avoided many of Killip's best-known pictures. "I was chasing something else, something altogether different," he says. "I didn't want this book to look like something you had seen before." Only three photographs from In Flagrante appear, towards the end. "The inclusion of those three pictures was a huge concession on my part to what had come before." One, Killip's celebrated image of a boy on a wall in Jarrow, becomes "a coda of sorts". There is, as Holborn writes in North, "both continuity and departure".

The sequence also foregrounds terrain. Killip is celebrated for the intensity of his encounters with people — children and teenagers, shipyard workers, fishing communities, families gathering sea coal at Lynemouth — but North clarifies the continuity of the landscape around them. Streets and housing estates, beaches, shipyards and industrial structures cease to be backgrounds; people and place become part of the same historical description. While North never betters the concise, angry dignity of In Flagrante, it conveys Killip's determination to map the margins — between city and country, sea and land, industrial past and uncertain future.

The editor's role, central here, was barely defined when In Flagrante was made. Holborn began at Creative Camera before moving to New York in the early 1980s to work at Aperture, where he helped bring Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency into publication. "Nan was raw, authentic, and so it seemed to me totally obvious to publish The Ballad of Sexual Dependency," he says. Working with Killip seemed equally obvious. When David Godwin at Secker & Warburg offered Killip a book following his 1985 Serpentine exhibition with Graham Smith, Another Country, Killip specifically requested Holborn as editor, drawn to the internationalism of his Aperture experience.

For In Flagrante, the two abandoned Killip's preliminary dummy and laid pictures across Holborn's floor. "He was an artist. He made pictures. I absorbed them and arranged them," Holborn says. The vertical format was his decision; images frequently ran across the gutter — a choice a contemporary Time Out review complained about and Holborn defends without apology. "A portfolio of good pictures doesn't have the right voltage," he says. "This is an angry book. It's savage... It's an attack; an assault on the images themselves. Without it, the book would be docile."

For Holborn, editing a photobook is closer to editing film than arranging a portfolio. A sequence should become "cumulatively emotional", controlling the reader's experience of time. "You move fast-forward, and you pause, and you slow down, and you accelerate… The looking at the book has its own time."

What endures in the pictures, he says, is a tension between form and content. "The first thing you see in the photographs is that they're remarkably elegant," he says. "Their elegance is almost in contrast to their subject matter." He points equally to their tenderness: "It's a very brutal world, and within this brutal world there are remarkable scenes of tenderness... There is great picture-making, but within those pictures there is enormous humanity."

That humanity complicates the shorthand of Killip as a photographer of Thatcher's Britain. The central photographs in North begin in 1975 and were made under Labour and Conservative governments alike; reducing them to opposition to Conservative power, Holborn writes, is "far too simplistic". "He was photographing a world that was passing as he photographed it," Holborn says. "It was a world in transition, and the old world was decaying and collapsing all around. At the time Killip was making it, he sensed it, but it was still there. Now it's gone."

Holborn realised while working on North that the distance separating a young reader today from Killip's North East roughly equals that separating the 1980s from the Second World War. "When someone wants to find imagery of the north of England in the late 20th century, they will turn to Killip."

With Killip no longer present to approve or reject his choices, the editor's judgement rests on something more elusive. "I've made a living with my eyes," Holborn says. "How to look is how I've made my living for the last 40 or 50 years. I have to trust that."

Chris Killip: North is edited by Mark Holborn and published by Thames & Hudson, priced £75.