Philip Quirk

Philip Quirk (11 November 1948, Melbourne) is an Australian photographer, photojournalist and educationist, known for his specialist imagery of landscape, geographic and documentary photography, and as a founding member of the Wildlight agency.

Philip Quirk was born in Melbourne, Australia on 11 November 1948 to Valentine Quirk, a communications engineer, and mother Phyl.

He grew up with a younger sister and older brother in East St Kilda & Caulfield and attended St Kilda Christian Brothers College where he completed Matriculation before briefly studying Business at RMIT.

From the age of 14 he had been a keen surfer around Torquay, but in a 1969 car accident he suffered a severely broken arm and over the year that it took to recover, he started to photograph his surfer friends with a 35mm Pentax Spotmatic and telephoto 500mm F5.5 Takumar lens.

Through a friend Quirk met the Melbourne fashion photographer and stylist couple Bruno & Hazel Benini who gave him access to their darkroom in which to process his surfing shots.

His first published photograph was in the Melbourne Herald for an article on Bells Beach by Victorian surf champion Rod Brooks.

In 1970 Bruno Benini encouraged him to enter Ilford Australia's national competition the 'Age of Aquarius' for a return trip to London, in which he was short listed in the final ten, though then disqualified as an amateur.

He went on to assist Benini, who arranged a meeting for him with the contest winner Paul Cox, who was lecturer in photography at Prahran College of Advanced Education.

With his parents' blessing Quirk enrolled to study there 1971-3 under Gordon De L’Isle, Athol Shmith and Cox, while continuing as Benini's assistant until 1974.

Since 1972, Quirk has continually exhibited his early street photography, his mature-period landscapes and social documentaries of country people, and portraits of Australian personalities including Sidney Nolan and Brett Whiteley, and is represented by Josef Lebovic Gallery in Kensington, and previously by Sydney's Macquarie Galleries before their cessation.

On graduation, Quirk worked as a photographer for the Southern Cross Newspaper Group and was a lecturer at Gordon Institute of Technology (now Deakin University) and at Photography Studies College before moving to Sydney in 1976 to start a freelance photojournalism practice.

There, he also taught part-time at Sydney College of the Arts and later was a foundation lecturer at the Australian Centre for Photography.

With Grenville Turner and Mark Lang, Quirk worked from a Surry Hills studio run by Anthony Browell & Graham McCarter, before founding the Wildlight Agency.

Before 1979 he used a Hasselblad to create panoramas (mostly of landscape subjects) for David Beal's Audience Motivation, a pioneering audio-visual company based in Paddington.

The precisely cut medium-format colour transparencies were overlapped so that no line was visible on screen.

Rick Smolan's A Day in the Life of Australia project through 1981-2, was a catalyst for the origins of Wildlight Photo Agency.

Carolyn Johns & Philip Quirk were photographers for the project, Christina De Water a volunteer.

During the project, they met and socialised with the influential international photographers, many of whom were attached to agencies, and later, in reencountering some who returned on their way to shoot assignments, they became inspired to establish their own, believing an Australian agency could deliver a better conduit to international magazines and publishers for Australian imagery.

Beal imported the first 6x17 cm camera, the Linhof Technorama 617 into the country and Quirk adopted it in 1981, using a Schneider Super Angulon 90mm f5.6 wide-angle lens.

Other Wildlight photographers Grenville Turner and Mark Lang also found the camera useful for imagery of outback Australia in which the Agency specialised, before the 6x17 cm format became commonplace, and panoramas clichés of domestic décor.

Senior Australian photographer Max Dupain highlights Quirk's work in his review of a landmark survey at the Albury Regional Gallery;

"Phillip Quirk observes life and it offshoots with a keen eye for elements that seem to fall into exact places which he endows with a twist of wry humour (City to Surf). Look at the interaction of both horses' legs in The Drought. The symmetry is so well-timed and composed'"

Critic Anne Latrielle in The Age praised his representations of Australian flora in a show at The Lighthouse Gallery, Prahran;

"'Philip Quirk shows the city-dweller stunning aspects of the Australian landscape, from the pastoral calm of river redgums on the Murray River at Barmah to the brooding stillness of alpine forms under snow. Despite two decades of degradation the remaining scenic resources of our country are awe-inspiring. No one interested in our native flora should miss this show.'"

In 1982 he traveled to Wales to research and photograph for a book on the eisteddfod there and in Australia.

In 1984 they met with Oliver Strewe about forming such a cooperative and in 1985 Wildlight Photo Agency opened at 165 Hastings Parade Bondi Beach where they stayed for 10 years, then moved to offices at 87 Gloucester Street, The Rocks, then finally to Suite 14, 16 Charles St., Redfern.

In her summation of the year 1989 in photography, Beatrice Faust singled out Quirk's wilderness imagery in that exhibition as "exquisitely coloured and [using] natural light in a uniquely creative way."

and earlier elaborated;

"'Light is the key to Quirk’s fascination. The true subject of his work is not just the furnishings of the landscape but the space and light that gives it life. He uses delicate bounce light from snow to bring out the extraordinarily subtle colours in rocks that most of us would see as black, or catches the horizontal light of sunrise and sunset to bring out the colour latent in grass and foliage.'"

From 1990–2003 Quirk was Wildlight's managing director.

However, by the mid 1990s video projection made slide projection redundant.

Quirk's work has been secured for most major national public collections and he was thus represented in On the Edge: Australian Photographers of the Seventies, at San Diego Museum of Art, California in 1995, the photographs drawn from the Philip Morris collection at the National Gallery of Australia.

Quirk's imagery of the period often contains wry visual commentary on Australian lifestyles, especially its beach culture.

In order to represent the expansive and often flat Australian landscape, Quirk advanced the use of the panorama.

As part of the agency’s activities between 1997 and 2001 he managed and published Australian Faces & Places Diary, a showcase of Australian reportage & documentary photography of exclusively black-and-white imagery printed in warm duo-tone.

At the end of 2003, after eighteen years, Quirk stood down as managing director of Wildlight Photo Agency and is presently living in Sydney and archiving its output.

Since his retirement from the Agency, Quirk has undertaken a series of speaking engagements including the 2003 David Moore Lecture and the 2004 Walkley Forum, as well as gallery floor talks and presentations to Media Arts students.

In 2005 Quirk was commissioned by the NSW Farmers Association to make a series of portraits of farming families and their working life in 13 regions of New South Wales.

The agency, as a photographers' cooperative, was wound up on 13 December 2013, but the image collection is maintained by Andrew Stephenson.

Quirk's photographs were published widely, through Wildlight and freelance, in numerous books, newspapers and magazines including The Sunday Times Magazine, The Observer Magazine (UK), Stern, Der Spiegel, GEO, Time, Newsweek and National Geographic