I’ve finally recovered enough from an illness to start walking the streets around Adelaide with Ari with a camera. It was a short stint around my urban neighbourhood in the late afternoon on the long weekend.My eye was seduced by the windows of an empty shop in Gilles Street. It looked surreal:
shop windows, Gilles St, Adelaide
The empty shops in the CBD are increasing. People just aren’t spending. Some–eg., restaurants–cannot hang on until the postponed mining starts. So they go bust. Just after making the picture I was hassled by an aggressive paranoid schizophrenic who took great exception to me with a standard poodle walking the streets.
Ari and I wandered around Bowden late this afternoon.
I’d gone there to check out Fontanelle, as I understood that there was a darkroom there and workshops on alternative technologies, processing and printing called The Analogue Lab. I was looking for a darkroom in Adelaide to develop my 8×10 black and white sheet film. I presumed that this photographic facility is run in association with the Fontanelle Gallery and Studio in Bowden. Everything was closed.
So Ari and I went walking around the streets. I took a few snaps. This picture of industrial forms (Conroys Smallgoods) was in Sixth Street, just down the road from Fontanelle before the Drayton Street corner. I used to work at Conroys when studying at Flinders University and the money I earned there enabled me to set myself up with different types of large format cameras.
Conroys, Bowden, Adelaide
Bowden was located close to the city, park lands and the train line and it is where I used to live and work in the 1980s. I had a photographic studio and darkroom in Gibson St near Seventh St, and I used to walk around the area and photograph it with medium and large format cameras. I also spent a lot of time walking in the western parklands with Fichte, my standard poodle.
Though I’d develop the film myself, I was never much good at printing (ie., producing a fine print), so I never exhibited the work about Bowden as a place. I just built up an archive of negatives in a filing cabinet. I’ve started to revisit and to digitalize.
It has been a while since I’ve wandered the streets of Adelaide on a daily walk with Ari and a digital camera. Today was the first day that I returned to walking the streets taking photos:
Ari, Adelaide
I was wanting to take more street level photography for the Adelaide book. The draft is top heavy with ‘birds-eye’ views of the city. I wondered if the digital camera become a tool of the flâneur who walks the city in order to experience the present conditions of daily urban life. This urbanscape in which we live which is often ignored or taken for granted.
The idea of the flâneur returns us to the Situationists concept of psychogeography, which is the practice of exploring places in unpredictable ways within the society of the spectacle. This is connected to a favorite practice of the dadaists, who organized a variety of expeditions, and the surrealists, for whom the geographical form of automatism was an instructive pleasure.
I’ve been glancing through Anne Marsh’s recent book Look: Contemporary Australian Photography since 1980 (2010) looking at what kind of photography of Australian cities has been done. This work is in the Space section of the text, which also includes suburbs, inhabitants (people in urban settings) and rooms as well as cities.
There is much more photography on suburbs than cities. Surprisingly the photographic representations of cities in the Marsh text is very thin. Disturbingly thin. Australian photographers, apparently, live in the suburbs not the inner city. When they turn to the urban their focus is on people, where they work in the humanist street photography tradition.
There is no text from Marsh on this mish mash of work by Daniel Crooks, Sandy Edwards, Rozalind Drummond, Robyn Stacey, Les Walking, Ian De Cruchy, Simon Cuthbert, Carl Warner and Kit Wise. There is more interesting work on Flickr.
Leigh St, Adelaide
Leigh St in Adelaide has been selected to become the Adelaide equivalent of a Melbourne laneway. It will be closed off to traffic with the hope that it becomes a vibrant space full of people eating, drinking and conversing with friends. The programme to make Adelaide a vibrant and lively place is called Splash.
Suzanne, Ari and I spent the day in the McLaren Vale wine region taking in the various exhibitions in The Shimmer 2012 Photography Festival. It was organized around a birthday lunch for Suzanne at Penny’s Hill.
Primo Estate, McLaren Vale
I was really fascinated by Alice Blanch’s Box Brownie black and white landscapes where she is using the technology of another era with all its shortcomings as the basis for a new view of old subject matter.
I haven’t done much photography on poodlewalks in the last couple of weeks. I have been preparing work for the Shimmer Festival organized by the City of Onkaparinga. I did manage to take a few location shots for a large format shoot with the Sony NEX-7. The location for the scoping was yet another carpark with iron bars to prevent people in a state of despair from jumping off.
Bentham St, Adelaide
It used to be the case that art photography was measured according to the conventions and aesthetic values of the painted image. The latest defence of that position was provided American formalist modernism. But that has changed now, as in the late 20th century the strict modernist boundaries between photography and other media like sculpture, painting or performance became increasingly porous–ie., with postmodernism.
I’ve been looking at this new architecture in King William Street off and on for a while. These new developments are a mixture of offices and apartments and they are an indication of the urban re development that is now happening in the southern end of Adelaide’s CBD.
I’ve tried a number of photographs of these buildings from the street. None have really worked. I needed elevation, such as the Southgate carpark. The previous shoot was during the fog, but the buildings looked too drab. They needed some urban light.
So I decided to see what they looked like in the late afternoon as everybody was leaving their offices to go home:
Southgate carpark, Adelaide
The idea I had was the play of the light afternoon light with a darkened sky. That didn’t happen yesterday but the light was there. It looks all too lush for me.
There was heavy fog in Adelaide this morning and it took until until midday to clear to a sunny day. I took the opportunity during peak hour to go and take a few picture of my local neighbourhood in the fog. I wanted to use a car park in Holland St that is only open on weekdays for some pictures of the southern part of the CBD.
fog, Gilbert St, Adelaid
It was a scoping exercise for a possible large format shoot as well as interest in what this part of Adelaide would look like in photographed in the fog. There was no sunshine until midday and so the lack of urban light meant that everything looked dull and flat.
My local urban neighbourhood in the inner city of Adelaide is changing rapidly due to re-emergence of urban renewal after the global financial crisis and the influx of international students. Since I may be leaving this neighbourhood in a year or so, I’ve started taking a closer look at it–wandering around the Central Market Precinct looking for photographic possibilities amongst the daily life.
Gouger St, Adelaide
And so we step into the technological apparatus of the camera and its relationship to memory and history in modernity. Often what photograph’s preserve as remembered history is the nostalgia arising from a pervasive and intractable sense of loss from the relentless change of industrial capitalism; a relentless change with its desire to overreach history, overthrow all traditions, habits and conventions, in oder to reinvent the future as the line of progress.
I’m back in Adelaide after the brief trip to Melbourne. The smallness of the city of Adelaide was a bit of a culture shock after Melbourne. Adelaide really is a regional town.
I decided to spend the early afternoon exploring the area around the Central Market precinct by walking around the edges of the carpark above the market even though the lighting was too harsh. I recalled that the edge of the car park had grills but not wire netting so I would be able to stick the lens of my camera through the grill if the view of the city was any good.
I wanted to see what views the car park offered of the mixture of old and the new architecture, the historical architectural layering of the CBD, and people moving along the street space contained by the build environment.
Grote St, Adelaide
I was just looking for possibilities to explore with a medium format camera, hand held, as it is possible to get a lens through the carpark grill, or maybe with a bit of luck even finding an open space with no grill so that I could use the 5×4.
