Jessica Kirk
Photographer, Sydney
Australian photographer Jessica Kirk has been shooting film for the last eight years. She began photographing via the humblest of means—a used Olympus Trip she purchased from a charity shop for $3. She typically shoots in natural light. Her work tends to focus on female beauty, and often veers into the realms of soft erotica. She has also found inspiration in philosophy and classic literature.
Your idea of happiness?
I once read that the West is fixated on the concept of happiness as a constant state of being - as the ultimate level of achievement, and that rather, in other cultures happiness is an emotion that naturally comes and goes like the rest. In another time, happiness was salvation through divine relations. Now, happiness has been argued as salvation through human relations, romantic love. Basically, I’m still figuring it out. I think I’ll always be figuring it out. But right now, my idea of happiness is a hot cup of English Breakfast tea.
Your idea of misery?
Running out of milk for my tea.
If not yourself, who would you be?
Attempted to come up with a witty metaphysical loophole as to what constitutes me as me. Gave up, it was wanky.
Your heroes?
Tupac Shakur.
What is your present state of mind?
I just finished a three thousand word paper on the myth of romantic love in relation to von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, so - bleak. But contentment within the bleak. I guess I can attribute that to Hume’s argument that it is within human nature to pamper to the sensitive rather than the cognitive, despite understanding and knowledge. So, although the deconstruction to my worldview, I still hope.
Bedside table books?
Thus Spake Zarathustra – Nietzsche, Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan, Anna Karenina – Tolstoy, The Living Year – John Keats, To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee, Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov, The Perks of Being A Wallflower – Stephen Chbosky.
What do you do if you can’t sleep at night?
Indulge in an existential crisis.
Do you collect?
Vinyl.
What is the strangest thing you believed as a child?
Well, ‘strangest’ or ‘coolest’ (I don’t know), I had a poster of Casper the Friendly Ghost on my wall. I would take imaginary him to school with me everyday and play with him on the monkey bars. That was short lived as I decided to make friends with real people in my class (bummer).
A color?
Black?
A city?
Copenhagen.
What are your plans for this weekend?
There is this neat bar I came across recently, from the drawn curtains outside it looks like an old butcher shop past it’s day… But as it turns out, once you go inside it is a dimly lit honkey bar. I want to drag my friend there with me. (Please come, Kaylah).
A song?
Jeff Buckley – Hallelujah.
Right or left handed?
Right.
What is the best dish you can cook?
Baked beans on toast.
What is your middle name?
Mary – after my Irish great-grandmother.
What do you do in your free time?
Drive. I’m in a long-term relationship with the highways between the city and the coast north of it…
I like the open road and the places it takes me.