A lo fi visual diary
This architectural urban decay is locked behind a fence that protects a private carpark for those working in the lawyer precinct. It is difficult to gain access to the car park because the gate is always closed and operated by a card. I was allowed in because Ari did his cute act.
The site is earmarked for development–glass tower office blocks, judging from the advertising. Nothing much is happening, even though this site is in the heart of the CBD in the central market precinct.
I’ve started to include the western part of the city in our daily walks when I am in Adelaide.
It’s an area that is undergoing change due to the student living connected to the western campus of the University of South Australia, the state Labor government’s investment in a new public hospital and medical research facilities, and the new tramline along North Terrace to the Entertainment Centre. Is an old Adelaide disappearing, as a new cityscape emerges? A vision of a more vital Adelaide.
The real estate agents are talking of a boom. It’s early days. The empty lots, warehouses and workshops are going to be replaced by new housing developments. What sort? High rise? Medium rise? Will there be any concern for the street life? Will new cafe’s and bars spring up?
Ari and I went wandering down the west part of the CBD. I had to drop a book— Formless: a user’s guide by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss-— off at the University of South Australia library library and I wanted to scope the new South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute centre (SAHMRI) currently being built on Nth Terrace.
I’ve tried a few of the more conventional or modernist approaches to photographing the SAHMRI but none have worked. I’ve been frustrated by this as the restricted access to the site provides a photographer with little options.
Maybe this can help to make the shift away from a Greenbergian high modernism that emphasises “significant form,” “the autonomy of the work of art,” “pure visuality,” “transcendence,” the quest for “the essential,” etc without embracing the anti-aesthetic position of postmodernism in the arts.
Ari and I wandered around the west part of Adelaide this evening. The north west wind and high temperatures had gone as the cool change had come through. The air was cool, it was overcast and the light was soft. There were lots of young people out and about: walking the streets, sitting on balconies and drinking at pavement tables outside the various pubs.
Adelaide actually felt alive–revitalized.
My starting point, the idea that I had prior to the evening walk, was urban grunge in the form of the stalled development around the Precinct redevelopment of the former Balfours site on the corner Morphett and Franklin Streets in Adelaide. The high rise apartments –the Altitude–reminded me of an Eastern European housing commision site when it was being built.
I had the above in mind and I reckoned that Ari would find a way to get through the fence. He did.
When I had to return the zapped out modem from Encounter Studio to Internode on Thursday I decided to catch the tram into the CBD rather than walk in. I wanted to take some more photos of the street through the tram window, as it was overcast and the light was soft.
These tram photos are difficult to do because of the constraints of the exercise: it is hard to predict what is happening on the street, and more often than not the composition is lousy. Most of the pictures taken are quickly deleted. I generally take the photos when the tram has stopped at an intersection and is waiting for the traffic lights to turn green. This gives me some form of control in what is a very fluid situation.
It is not possible to take this kind of work in Adelaide on how people move within metropolises. Adelaide is a country town, not a metropolis.
Adelaide is a suburban city with a minimal high rise skyline and minimal inner city life. It still retains most of its urban parkland but its northern and southern suburbs are depressing dormitories. If there is a movement to inner city living and high rise apartment towers then there is also a retreat to the suburban backyard.
However, the traditional Australian backyard is disappearing more rapidly from new suburban estates on the urban fringe than it is from established middle suburbs.
I’ve been looking at my archives for pictures of the Adelaide CBD that would be suitable for the Adelaide City Council’s photography competition entitled Snap your city. It has to be a quality 8 x 12 inch print in a landscape format. Most of my urban work is in a square format or a vertical one.
I have little urban work in the horizontal format. There are the odd 5×7 image. I have yet to scan some of these. I’ll scan some more on the weekend and see what I’ve got. I’ve scanned them because I have trouble with the colour of the picture using Lightroom, and so I’ve been converting them to black and white.
It’s back to hanging around the rooftop of car parks. With early summer almost here it is now possible to photograph on the roof after the commuters have picked up their cars and returned to the suburbs. Adelaide has really been dumped on in the last couple of decades as backward, provincial and boring. Nothing happens in the city of churches. Sydney and Melbourne are where it is at. So we don’t see the city for what it is. What we see is what it lacks.
The city is changing due to a post the global financial crisis mini building boom, even the fabled BP Billiton Olympic Dam mine, which the boosters said would have produced rivers of gold in the streets of Adelaide, has been put on hold indefinitely.
Thomas St in the Central Market precinct of Adelaide provides views of the back of the strip of restaurants along the Gouger St. It has a grimy atmosphere that is lessened when the rays of the late afternoon sun in early summer lighten up the objects that are usually in deep shadow.
The street is compact and easy to explore photographically using a digital camera. The picture shows undercuts the tedious debates between photography and the digital image, the loss of the real from digital imaging technologies and the end of photography as we have known it.
After returning to Adelaide from painting the weekender at Victor Harbor Ari and I walked the streets of the CBD around the Central Market Precinct. It was the late afternoon walk and I was looking for some ideas to continue working on the Adelaide book.
Daylight saving had just started and there is now light in the city until after 7pm. Summer is just around the corner. The urban light has changed and become more hard edged. I stay in the shadows more.