The Tamesis
Kirk’s career began in the late 1970s; after studying medicine and film history, he eventually worked as an art director at Saatchi. In 1977, he met Michael Roberts, a well-known stylist and art director who was working at the Sunday Times in the UK, where he continued to work. “Tatler”, “Vanity Fair”,as well as new yorkerRoberts and Kirk became part of post-punk London’s creative fervor. This is how Kirk collaborated with designer Antony Price (for example, an image of a model reclining on a clinical white table) and produced three album covers for Roxy Music, namely declaration, flesh and bloodand Avalon.
Part of Kirk’s talents was his ability to carefully curate every aspect of an image, so much so that Elizabeth Tilberis, then editor of British Vogue, offered Kirk a job as a stylist. Kirk certainly has a gift for depicting appearances in meticulous, almost forensic detail. As Weber points out, this all happened before the Internet, so if you wanted to learn about fashion, you could only do it in the pages of magazines, not online. Vivienne Kirk attributes his filmmaking in part to his love of movies. Although all of his images possess a perfect imperfection and a spontaneous spirit, they are also carefully curated. “He would always draw little pictures in the movie boxes of how the story should go,” she said. For Weber, capturing the feeling of a moment is what makes his work special. “There’s always a sense that something has just happened, or is about to happen,” he said. “It’s very cinematic.”
Neil and Vivienne Kirk have lived between London and Los Angeles for decades, and for a photographer so determinedly forward-thinking and future-oriented, it took a while to come up with the idea for a book, which he began working on around 2018. Sadly, Kirk passed away in 2022 and Vivienne Kirk continued the project. Weber recalls finding boxes and boxes of images and negatives in Kirk’s garage outside London, including rare portraits of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren shot for Vogue Italia. This book is undoubtedly the crystallization of love and a testimony of love. Weber was fond of Kirk’s early work; Vivienne Kirk noted that her husband’s lesser-known menswear photos, full of color and featuring male models who would have looked right at home in 1930s Hollywood, were her favorites because they were much less well-known. However, throughout all of his work in this book, Kirk’s work is timely worthy of a closer look – one that is full of respect. “It’s a way to remind people of Neil,” Vivienne Kirk said of the book, “and show them that he was actually the unsung hero of fashion.”
