Westography IMAGES OF A VANISHING SUBURBIA
WARREN KIRK INTRODUCTION BY HELEN GARNER A U S T R 足 A L I A N
P H O T O G R A P H I C
G A L L E R Y
Westography
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Echo Publishing An imprint of The Five Mile Press 12 Northumberland Street, South Melbourne Victoria 3205 Australia www.echopublishing.com.au Part of the Bonnier Publishing Group www.bonnierpublishing.com Copyright Š Warren Kirk, 2016 All rights reserved. Echo Publishing thank you for buying an authorised edition of this book. In doing so, you are supporting writers and enabling Echo Publishing to publish more books and foster new talent. Thank you for complying with copyright laws by not using any part of this book without our prior written permission, including reproducing, storing in a retrieval system, transmitting in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or distributing. First published 2016 Cover and page design by Philip Campbell Design Printed in China National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Creator: Kirk, Warren, photographer. Title: Westography : images of a vanishing suburbia / Warren Kirk ; Helen Garner (author of the introduction). ISBN: 9781760069261 (hardback) Subjects: Suburban life--Australia--Pictorial works. Cities and towns--Australia--Pictorial works. Country life--Australia--Pictorial works. Australia--Social life and customs--Pictorial works. Other Creators/Contributors: Garner, Helen, 1942- writer of introduction. Dewey Number: 779.4 Twitter/Instagram: @echo_publishing Facebook: facebook.com/echopublishingAU
Front cover: Airport West
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Westography IMAGES OF A VANISHING SUBURBIA
WARREN KIRK INTRODUCTION BY HELEN GARNER
A U S T 足R A L I A N
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P H O T O G R A P H I C
G A L L E R Y
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Yarraville
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Contents Introduction by Helen Garner 6 Modest Dreams 8 Time Suspended 52 98 Secret Places Acknowledgements 159
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Introduction Every city has its secret worlds – obscure corners that the fashionable eye has passed over in its rush towards the new. The people who live and work in these worlds probably don’t think of them as secret. But when someone like Warren Kirk (aka the Westographer) drifts in with his camera, bringing his patient eye to sites of modest dreaming, something entrancing happens. Warren Kirk is drawn to forgotten things, to the old, the neglected, the left behind. He loves a bricked-up corner shop, a crumbling factory whose function is no longer evident, a locked weatherboard cottage so decrepit that it’s barely holding itself above the abyss of collapse. Sheds are important to him, their piled-up contents ancient, dusty and mysterious to the point where they have become abstract. He can’t go past a wall of old-style light switches with price tags still attached, or a cabinet packed with ethereal glassware, or a wooden map of Australia hung with two tight rows of souvenir teaspoons. He likes to get close to the textures of rust and peeling paint, to postwar logos that radiate the benign power of icons. He pays calm attention to workplace kitchens of unabashed filth, to stained walls and the tense ripples of clapped-out corrugated iron. His addiction to symmetry is fed by the unseen drivers who park their cars in the mathematical centre of the designated spots in front of their business premises. He admires a vehicle whose flaring colour matches precisely that of its owner’s house. He can withstand the pathos of an utterly pink bedroom with its single bed and floral wallpaper and satin valance. He is not daunted by a savagely mown lawn. Nor is he overwhelmed by the manic inwardness of a grotto into whose nooks and crannies only a god’s tiny messenger would venture.
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Life flows very quietly through these pictures. There is a mysterious familiarity in their quality of concentration. Though I have never been inside a bedroom like the totally pink one, the photo of it makes me feel that I have: somewhere in myself I recognise it. The dreams folded in its neat pillow are ones that I too have woken from. Likewise with the stubborn hopefulness of a chaotic backyard: on a barely conscious level I know and share this refusal to throw things away. Time is suspended in these photos. They are studies of stillness, of anonymity. If a clock hangs on a wall, the hour it shows has no urgent meaning. A street number on a building’s facade – the hint of a real address – administers a jolt. The few people depicted, all of a certain age, are lined by life’s vicissitudes and deeply at ease in their personal spaces; they regard the camera steadily, without smiling or performing. It seems a handmade world, a universe which, with its faded colours and worn textures, still takes for granted the seriousness of crafts and trades, and the hard-earned domestic authority of women. The cumulative effect of Warren Kirk’s photos is a slowed-down mood, respectful, drily comic, almost other-worldly. I have always suspected and hoped that such an element might still exist, somewhere in the city I’ve lived in for most of my life, but until now I had no idea where these secret places were, or how I could go looking for them. To contemplate them through the Westographer’s eye is to be drawn into a strangely calming, deeply benevolent parallel universe. Helen Garner
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Yarraville 36
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Yarraville 37
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Ascot Vale 56
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Airport West 57
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Seddon 58
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West Melbourne 59
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Yarraville 80
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West Footscray 81
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