Today’s beautiful thing was recommended by reader Phil McAloon who emailed me about Australian photographer Warren Kirk. I was so intrigued by Phil’s email, I thought I’d quote it. Take it away, Phil!

 “Warren Kirk has a photo stream (and book) called Westography.  He takes beautiful, elegiac photos of the passing of a way of life in the western suburbs of Melbourne, Australia.  This is an area where the wave of post-war migrants is slowly giving way to gentrification and highways.”

Phil’s phrase ‘elegiac photos’ gave me the shivers! He’s exactly right, of course, but that’s not a word it would have occurred to me to use in that way. Phil, maybe you should be writing this one!

Like the post I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the illustrator who has been chronicling the disappearing mom-and-pop shops of Tokyo, Kirk seems also to be trying to hang onto something, or at least to give it a good sendoff. I like his sense of nostalgia and his gimlet eye for brutal reality.

You can buy Westography: Images of a Vanishing Suburbia from Echo Publishing, and you can see all Kirk’s amazing photos on Flickr.

All images property of Warren Kirk.