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For decades, Warren Kirk has been on a mission to preserve something he says is dying: old-fashioned Australian suburbia.
“It’s beautifully ugly,” the Melbourne photographer says of the suburban aesthetic, with its relics like the outdoor tyre swan.
He says within the ‘banality’ of suburbia is a certain beauty many of us take for granted — one that tells us a lot about our history.
“What people don’t tend to understand is that they are living history themselves,” Kirk says.
He describes the space they occupy as a “living museum”.
And yet, he says, his suburban subjects are “self-effacing” and “humble”.
They’re not “jumping up and down [saying] ‘look at me, look at me’,” he says.
“I love people like that because their lives are still heroic.”
A ‘deeply benevolent parallel universe’
Part archivist, part archaeologist, Kirk is motivated by a desire to bring hidden beauty to the fore and, in doing so, stop it from being lost forever.
He’s just published his second book of photography, Suburbia, and has amassed a loyal following on Flickr.
While his objective is clear, the road to reach it is a little foggier.
Kirk’s approach, he admits, is “very ad hoc”.
Every day he loads his one-eyed dog Ocky into a van.
As they drive around, Kirk scans the sides of the streets, searching for something indefinable.
It’s a complete lucky dip.
Some days he’ll get nothing.
Other days he sees something that piques his interest, pulls over, and knocks on the door to get permission before he starts snapping.
His approach could appear a little shambolic, but from it comes something magical.
Kirk’s photos of suburbia are described by writer Helen Garner as “almost otherworldly”, revealing “secret places”.
“To contemplate them through [Kirk’s] eyes is to be drawn into a strangely calming, deeply benevolent parallel universe,” she writes in the preface of his first book.
‘The butt end of a time and place’
Many of Kirk’s photos are of places that don’t exist anymore.
“People have dropped off the perch or their house has been knocked down or business has closed,” he explains.
A Greek religious bookstore that he photographed a few years ago, for example, is now the site of a new design company.
“That’s the nature of what I’m doing — capturing the butt end of a time and place that’s not coming back,” Kirk says.
Respect for the artform and the subject
Kirk loves photography, but he is equally enamoured with his subjects.
When he knocks on someone’s door, he is invited into people’s lives, albeit for only a handful of minutes.
He enjoys the modesty of the people who live or work amidst the stuff he finds so beautiful — a shade of paint, curve of peeling wood or placement of curios, photographs and old tools.
“That’s just what surrounds them, so they don’t think about it and they don’t realise that they are stuck in time,” he says.
“They’re not like modern people who photograph their food and have Instagram accounts and their whole life is out there.
“They’ve done interesting things or they’ve worked — even just working in a menial job for 40 or 50 years, that takes a lot of tenacity. I couldn’t do that.”
Whether they want it or not, Kirk always returns to his subjects with a printed portrait for them.
Some, he says, are a bit embarrassed by the gesture.
Some give it a cursory look, others are really thankful and others still place it “on top of their messy desks that will eventually get covered with a million other bits of stuff”.
“But that doesn’t really worry me,” says the photographer with a mission.
“That’s not the point. I just like to do that as a thank you for someone if you’ve allowed me into your life.”
Topics: photography, fine-art-photography, books-literature, community-and-society, history, australia, vic, melbourne-3000
