'If you really take heed of what is around you, you find that nestled between the highrises are small stores and offices. Cobblers. Auto-electricians. Picture framers. Travel agents behind smoky, dusty windows.'
Mid-morning inside a Coburg workshop: a scene of daily life as featured in Warren Kirk's book Northside: A Place and Time.Some time ago, one evening in the early 1990s, a friend and I were walking down the southern end of High Street, Northcote, when we suddenly realised we were both hungry. We started looking for a place to eat. But gentrification had not yet crept across Westgarth Street, and, as it was mid-winter, there weren't any open restaurants or cafes in the vicinity.
Quickly, firing up the grill, she prepared us a small but tasty meal of grilled lamb, fried potatoes, and a green salad. We were so ravenous that we gulped the food down, and she and the men laughed at the enormity of our hunger."Dear Lord," I heard one of the old men exclaim. "Those poor children were starving!"
. His work gives that old north back to me. But unlike memory and unlike a dream, his photographs are bold, and the compositions and the framing are evidence of an artistic sensibility that is both exact and generous. His work is sharper than memory. The easy thing to assume is that my response to Kirk's art is an indulgence in nostalgia; that what I am gazing at when I look at his photographs is the past.But that is to make a fundamental mistake about the integrity of his work.
Like all great artists, Warren Kirk is sui generis. His photography is unlike any other photographer's work that I know. He captures a distinctly Australian urban landscape and face, but every image is imbued with a deep humanism and longing that I think can speak to everyone.The only other photographer's work that I can compare his to is that of Helen Levitt, the mid-20th century documentarian of New York City.
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