Flick through fashion archives from the Eighties and Nineties and you'll find rank after rank of models holding a pose: chin down, hip cocked, gaze fixed somewhere just past the lens.
The pictures of self-taught British photographer Neil Kirk (1946-2022), gathered for the first time in Neil Kirk in Vogue: The Supermodel Years, do something different almost every time.
A man and woman sprint across a city street in matching leaps, both feet off the ground. Seven models in beige tailoring stride out in lockstep like a fashion-world flash mob. Three women in cream knitwear collapse into each other laughing, arms flung wide.
Kirk, a regular contributor to Vogue's US, British, Italian and German editions through the golden years of the supermodel, built a career on catching people between poses rather than in them.
That's what makes this book worth a look for photographers well beyond the fashion world. Published by ACC Art Books with a foreword by Bryan Ferry and contributions from Helena Christensen, Claudia Schiffer, Sam McKnight and others, on paper it's a straightforward retrospective.
In practice it's closer to a masterclass in directing genuine movement rather than staging the appearance of it – shot on film, with none of the safety net that a digital burst mode gives photographers today.
Kirk's subject list, meanwhile, reads like a Who's Who of the era, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Jerry Hall, Yasmeen Ghauri, Carla Bruni, alongside actors like Ewan McGregor and Kate Winslet on their way to becoming household names.
But it's the choreography around them, not just who's in front of the camera, that gives the work its charge.
Directing chaos on a 35mm budget
Capturing genuine motion on film, rather than static poses, is a harder technical proposition than it looks. There's no chimping the back of a camera to check that you nailed the leap, no burst of 20 frames per second to fish the sharpest one out afterwards.
There's a picture in the book of a couple caught mid-stride, with both sets of feet airborne and expressions still composed rather than strained. That depends on nailing focus, exposure and timing simultaneously, on a subject who has to run the same route repeatedly until it works. No mean feet.
Sadly, this is a discipline that modern photographers can lose sight of, when a camera's autofocus and frame rate do a lot of the heavy lifting. Knowing precisely when a movement peaks, and trusting your own timing rather than your camera's, is a skill all of itself.
Having fun, not pretending to
Another clear theme here is Kirk's handling of groups. The seven-strong walking shot and the laughing trio shown above both do something pretty incredible, really: they transform a directed, repeated fashion set-up read into spontaneous, unguarded moment.
That's largely down to instruction rather than luck; coaxing real reactions out of models who know exactly what they're being asked to perform.
For anyone shooting groups, whether it's a wedding party or a corporate team photo, there's a lesson in Kirk's ability to give people something to actually do together, rather than somewhere to simply stand.
Neil Kirk in Vogue: The Supermodel Years is published by ACC Art Books. Hardback, 240 pages, 157 colour and 21 black-and-white images, ISBN 9781788843485.
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