Neil Kirk, the British fashion photographer who so memorably captured the world in motion and suffused it with emotion, particularly in the 1980s and ’90s, did something very telling whenever he was asked what he did for a living. “Neil would say he was a shoe salesman,” remembers his wife, the stylist Vivienne Kirk, laughing. “He never really believed in self-promotion, to the point he wouldn’t even put a photograph that he’d taken on the wall.” Vivienne Kirk has now co-authored with writer and curator Iain R. Webb Neil Kirk in Vogue, The Supermodel Years, ACC Art Books, a wonderfully kinetic, joyful, and gorgeous tribute to Kirk’s work for just about every edition of Vogue. It’s impossible to imagine the wrangling of getting all of these images in one book, snappily art directed by Rita Sowins. Yet there they are, thanks to former publishing executive Liz Rees-Jones, who along with Kirk and Webb miracle worked it into existence.
The wrangling required to get all of these images was no small project; credit goes to Liz Rees-Jones, who along with Kirk and Webb miracled it into existence.
To get back to that remark of Kirk’s, it’s telling for two reasons: For one thing, everyone says he was super-fun and super-fast when working, but also super-unconcerned with playing the star. And by everyone, I mean, everyone: Kirk collaborated with Grace Coddington, Jerry Hall, Anna Wintour, Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music (Ferry provides the book’s foreword) Cindy Crawford, Michael Roberts, Elizabeth Tilberis, Yasmin Le Bon, Helena Christensen, Antony Price, Claudia Schiffer, Caroline Baker, Jeny Howorth…yes, everyone. And for another, saying he sold shoes was kind of ironic, given his work was always about moving, usually on foot. Kirk was never happier than when photographing walking backwards, furiously shooting, getting the picture, in life, at that exact moment.
For much of this book, Kirk’s models, true to the times, are majorly coiffured, majorly bejeweled, and majorly power-suited. Yet in his images they carried all that off as if they were in jeans and tees, like his test Polaroid of a black-clad, wasp-waisted Cindy Crawford confidently leaping into the frame with all the physical control of an athlete. His models were forever go-go-going. They could be striding around London’s Holborn Viaduct (his favorite location); hailing cabs in Manhattan; grooving en masse across Paris’s Place des Victoires in perfect synchronicity; or, on the back of a moped zipping into the middle distance, with a huge smile. Kirk’s work, as is so ably shown in this book, represented a fabulous, heightened reality, yet also a seismic break with the arch, posed stillness of mid-century fashion imagery, or the whimsical narratives which followed. The era of Kirk’s work was shaped by feminism, and the moment to reject decorative passivity and challenge all the restrictive ways women had been portrayed. Instead, it was imagery about agency and possibility.
Vogue’s audiences, it turned out, loved his images for that. “When I spoke with Robin Derrick,” says Webb of British Vogue’s long-standing art director, “he told me it was Neil’s pictures that the readers responded to the most. As Vivienne knows, it’s very easy to take couture dresses off of the runway, and take a beautiful picture,” Webb went on to say, “but to take real clothes and dress models in them in real situations? It’s not so easy to make that fabulous and glamorous, but Neil did. There was always a glamour you could aspire to with the reality—and the reality in his images was very reflective of Neil’s personality.”
Kirk’s career began in the late 1970s; after studying medicine and then film history, he ended up working as an art director for advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi. He had met the renowned stylist and art director Michael Roberts, then at the British Sunday Times in 1977, before he went on to Tatler, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker, and Roberts and Kirk became part of the creative fervor of post-punk London. That’s how Kirk came to work with designer Antony Price (such as the image of a model reclining in still repose, for once, on a clinical white table), and doing three album covers for Roxy Music, namely Manifesto, Flesh and Blood, and Avalon.
Part of Kirk’s talent was his ability to orchestrate every aspect of the image, to the extent that Elizabeth Tilberis, the then editor of British Vogue, offered Kirk a job as a stylist. It’s certainly true that Kirk was gifted at depicting the look in finely honed, near-forensic detail; as Webb points out, this was all pre-Internet, so if you wanted to look at fashion, you were doing it on the page of a magazine, not online. Vivienne Kirk puts his picture making down in part to his love of cinema; for all of his images’ perfect imperfection and spontaneous spirit, they were also meticulously planned. “He would always do these little cinematic boxes of drawings of how the story should flow,” she says. For Webb, that sense of capturing a moment in time is what set his work apart. “There was always this sense of something has just happened, or is about to happen,” he says. “It’s very filmic.”
Neil and Vivienne Kirk spent decades living between London and Los Angeles, and for a photographer who was so resolutely forward-thinking and -facing, it took him a while to come around to the idea of a book, which he did around 2018. Sadly, Kirk passed away in 2022, and Vivienne Kirk kept going with the project. Webb recalls that they found boxes and boxes of images and negatives—including a rare portrait of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren shot for Vogue Italia—in Kirk’s garage just outside London. The book is a labor of love, for sure, but also a testament of love. Webb adores Kirk’s early work; Vivienne Kirk mentions how her husband’s lesser-known menswear shoots, which vibrate with color, and peopled by male models who look like they’d be at home in 1930s Hollywood, are some of her favourites because they’re much lesser known. Yet what comes through across all of his work in this book is how much it’s time Kirk’s work is due a deeper look—one carrying a lot of respect. “It is a way to remind people of Neil,” says Vivienne Kirk of the book, “and to show them he was actually an unsung hero of the fashion world.”
