urban Archives - Poodle Walks

June 10, 2018June 10, 2018

Victor Harbor township

The period inbetween the photo session in Melbourne and the training walks for the camel trek in the Northern Flinders involved me photographing in the Victor Harbor township whilst Kayla and I have been on our early morning poodlewalks.

We only do this urban walk occasionally–it provides shelter when it is raining or the coastal winds are gale force. Since this coastal township is quite small, this early morning walk needs to incorporate the beach around the Granite Island causeway.

I do find it a sad and depressing township to walk around in the early morning with Kayla. What is so noticeable apart from the empty streets are the number of the small shops along Ocean Street, the main street, that really struggle to survive.

These shops come and go and they don’t really last all that long. This is in spite of the upgrade to Ocean Street by the Victor Harbor Council to revitalise the town centre, and to make it more attractive for the day tourists to stroll around in. Continue reading “Victor Harbor township”

December 29, 2017December 30, 2017

Xmas

We are in the middle of the Xmas summer holidays and the Heritage Trail is now extremely popular, as is the beach at Petrel Cove. As usual the recreational fishermen are out in force in their hunt the oceanic wilderness beyond the Encounter Marine Park for the Southern Bluefin tuna. This recreational fishing is still allowed in Australia, despite the accepted global status of Bluefin tuna as an over-fished species.

There appears to be a lot more people holidaying on the southern coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula this year. Maybe people are holidaying locally cos the poor exchange rate for Australian dollar makes the overseas holiday trips too expensive?

Kayla and I have taken to walking around the empty streets of the township at 6.30 am for our early morning walks:

We wander down any alleyway that we come across that would provide some shade and protection from the wind. The alleyways allow us to avoid all the runners and the bicyclists on the paths near the beach. Continue reading “Xmas”

October 10, 2017

retracing old urban walks with Ari in Adelaide

Whilst Lariane Fonseca was staying with us at Encounter Bay whilst on her way back to Geelong from her Flinders Ranges trip I took the opportunity to do some research for the Adelaide Photography 1970-2000 book and to walk Adelaide’s CBD.

It was a nostalgic walk. I re-walked some of the routes that I used to do with Ari when we were living in the CBD. It was all about my memories. I even returned to some of the carparks that we used to visit and explore together:

The early morning and late afternoon poodlewalks walks in the CBD with Ari are what I miss about not living in the city now. I don’t really miss anything else about living in the city.

Continue reading “retracing old urban walks with Ari in Adelaide”

September 4, 2015

revisiting Port Adelaide

After sitting the final day of my Australian Abstractions exhibition at the Light Gallery I drove down to Port Adelaide to see some of the local SALA exhibitions before they finished. They cafe’s were closed, so Ari and I wandered around the place. It had been a while since we’d done that.

I took a few snaps in, and around, some of my favourite haunts:

Photographing the Port was going to be a central project for me several years ago, but it kinda faded away for some reason. It was where I started my large format work in black and white in the 1980s when I had a studio at Bowden, and I returned to when I picked up my large format photography again 30 years latter. But the momentum died as I slowly lost interest.
Continue reading “revisiting Port Adelaide”

August 15, 2015

road trips

Now that we are living Victor Harbor we have had to own two cars in order to do things. That means I have a photography car–a Mazda 606– which I can use for my photographic road trips.

This picture of Southern Cross Station in Melbourne was made on an earlier holiday trip with Suzanne and the poodles. We were staying with my sister at Safety Beach on the Mornington Peninsula, and I had gone into the city to do some photography.

This trip gave me the idea of returning to the photo road trip once we had got the two cars that would allow me to be able to do it. Now we have these I can get away. I recently did a trial run to Canberra via Hay last week and I was able to shoot some river gum roots for the Edgeland project that I’d seen whilst walking the poodles on an earlier trip to Canberra.
Continue reading “road trips”

August 2, 2015

off to Canberra

The Australian Abstractions exhibition at The Light Gallery has opened, the artist talk has been given, and work on the abstraction book with Moon Arrow Press has started. The artist talk addressed why the black and white part of the exhibition is a stand-in for the absent modernist black and white works of the 1950s and 1960s. It also addressed the claim by photographic historians that Australian photography does not have a tradition of abstractions and that Australian photographers are not interested in abstraction.

The preparatory work for my image in the ‘Time’ exhibition at the Lost Ones Gallery for the Ballarat International Foto Biennale 2015 will be done early this week. Then I’m off on a photo trip to Canberra on Thursday to continue working on the Edgelands project.

Meanwhile we continue to walk around the coast if the winter weather permits. It has been very stormy during July, and we have often walked around the town centre or the Heysen Trail to seek protection from the strong off shore winds. Continue reading “off to Canberra”

July 16, 2015

in Melbourne: thinking about Flickr

It is argued that in contrast to the Kodak culture, where a small group of persons (friends and family) share oral stories around images with others, the digital new culture of the image on Flickr, the photo-sharing site, is one where a large-scaled conversation is shared with people that participants don’t know in real life.

That large-scaled conversation shared with people used to be the case with Flickr, but it is less so know. Flickr’s key strengths are seen as photo sharing and storage. Around 2005/2006 it was the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. There was the social sharing which used to be quite active in a community sense because Flickr was a place where people who took photography more seriously went.

No longer. The impact of the mobile phone has meant that people tick the ‘like’ button for an particular image, rather than comment or engage in a large scale conversation on other people’s photos. I used to engage in the conversations but with Yahoo’s recent (2013) revamp/redesign of Flickr I more or less drop an image into my photo stream and run. The new style Flickr represents a “sea change” in its purpose. Continue reading “in Melbourne: thinking about Flickr”

March 11, 2015

petrol stations

Ari and I have started walking around the Victor Harbor township on some of our early morning poodle walks. We needed a change from walking the beach at the western end of Encounter Bay each morning at dawn and I wanted to start walking earlier that 6.45am. We can wander around the town in the dark because of the street lights, and then I can take photos after dawn has broken.

There are only a few people about the town at this time of the morning–mostly groups of people walking across the causeway to Granite Island and back again.

The National Broadband Network people, who were very visible laying cable in the township and around Encounter Bay, seem to have disappeared. I don’t see any crews working on the streets whilst making my way back to Encounter Studio. And there I was thinking that the western end of Encounter Bay where we live would be getting FTTP in the next 6 months. That’s a dream.

The NBN Co appears to have slowed down its broadband rollout under the new Multi-Technology Mix (MTM) and I fear that our area of Encounter Bay will be outside the fibre footprint. Continue reading “petrol stations”

December 14, 2014

making cities liveable

Walking around Adelaide’s CBD with Ari has enabled me to see that urban design in Adelaide, since the 1960s, has been structured around keep the car happy.

Its been about suburban sprawl, traffic efficiency and parking spaces rather than public spaces for people to gather. The assumed model of urban design is the old modernist one— modern cities are about high-rises and good windy spaces rather than being about the human lives lived within the city.

It was only liveable because it was small or compact and so avoided the congestion of Sydney. The recent shift is towards densifying Adelaide around the core infrastructure, transport hubs and a diversity of income groups in the CBD. Continue reading “making cities liveable”

November 25, 2014

in Canberra

We stayed at Banks in Canberra during the opening of the Edgelands exhibition at Manning Clark House.

Banks is on the eastern edge of this car-based, suburban city and is in the Tuggeranong district/valley. Banks is on the edge of Canberra’s outer suburban fringe. Our poodle walks in the morning and evening were along firebreak trails on both sides of the valley. We found the walks to be thoroughly enjoyable and attractive.

But you need a car to get around Canberra as the public transport to the city is woeful. It’s a long drive to school, work, shops, doctors, or leisure centres. Since the dominant mode of transport is by car, there is congestion in and around the CBD in spite of all the transport planning to ensure the flowing movement of the car.

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