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.”
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