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.
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.
He was also 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.
With Grenville Turner and Mark Lang, Quirk worked at a Surry Hills studio run by Anthony Browell & Graham McCarter, before founding the Wildlight Agency.
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.
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.
"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.
Since his retirement from the agency, Quirk has undertaken a series of speaking engagements, including the 2003 David Moore Lecture, 2004 Walkley Forum, and the 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.
This broader series documented the landscape, arable farming, and the natural environment with portraits to illustrate the subjects’ relationships with the land, accompanied with text recording their concerns over drought and environmental degradation caused by reduced water flows in the two major river systems in the district.
[28] Amidst his professional work, Quirk continued his teaching activities and was Chairman for Australia and NZ of the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass 1998 - 2013.
[31] Quirk has won industry awards and government grants for his projects which have included a commission from the organisation 'Beyond Empathy' which uses arts intervention to address the deficits experienced by disadvantaged individuals and communities.