Kirk's Enterprise

The Bill Kirk photography exhibition at the Red Barn Gallery in Belfast is wonderful. Dozens of black and white images, flashes of the city in rough times, bad histories and occasional rhapsodies.

Unlike some of the reportage photographers during that era, there is no Troubles Porn. Nobody gets exploited. The conflict isn't presented as some weirdly sexy thing. And we've seen too much of that before. Rather, Bill goes looking for the quiet insight, the alternative drama. And so we get to see the old fellas in the snug, the kids finding pure fun in the terrace rows, the mods and the punks out parading.

Bill Kirk came from Newtownards and his youth was marked by tuberculosis, which killed his parents and almost finished him off as well. He gave up a desk job for photograpy, and he was faithful to the gentle, humanist style of Cartier Bresson and André Kertész. He worked for the tourist board and massed up so many images that are only now being revealed.

I meet up with Frankie Quinn at the gallery, who is rightfully in awe of the man's legacy. Frankie is helping to catalogue over 16,000 frames and amazing shots are still presenting themselves. There's a shot that Quinn discovered on a old roll, of a little girl, leaping across a wave at Tyrella Beach. It's pure Cartier-Bresson and the poetry of it leaves you stunned. So too with those pictures inside the Klondyke Bar on Sandy Row, a year before an exposion that would take out the building and a barman with it.

Like the American photographer Walker Evans, our guy Bill Kirk was interested in the little details of people's houses, those totems of life and community. I have a well-loved copy of Bill's old book, Images Of Belfast, but these exhibition prints are even more persuasive. Bill is still with us too, cycling into his seventies and working on his digital techniques. Legend.

Bill Kirk: A Retrospective, Red Barn Gallery, 43b Rosemary St, Belfast, BT1, until April 26.