Category: photography

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heritage at Port Adelaide

This picture of the former Customs Clearing Office, known locally as the Radio Shack, on the corner of Todd and Divett streets, in Port Adelaide shows the state of heritage at the Port. This area has been earmarked for residential redevelopment, and this historic building, which housed the Port Adelaide Radio Club for more than 15 years, has been left to decay.

radio shack

It is currently owned by the South Australian state government Land Management Corporation, whose “primary aim is to provide social, economic and environmental benefits to all South Australians”. It looks as if it will be quarantined from the waterfront development of the “upmarket” lifestyle residences that has stalled since the global financial crisis.

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at Port Adelaide

I went to Port Adelaide this afternoon with the 5×7 Cambo and the poodles in the car as soon as the wind dropped and the clouds rolled in. I had a couple of shots of decayed industrial architecture in mind that I thought would suit this kind of format.

pink door, Port Adelaide

Unfortunately what looked like a rock band was being photographed as a ‘street hoody gang’ at one of the woolstore locations that I had in mind, and, as the poodles would have destroyed the carefully cultivated ‘outlaw’ look, we moved onto another possible location. As soon as we got out of the car to check it out it started to rain. Damnation.

So we walked around the streets where the old warehouses are located for a bit and I took a few snaps with the digital camera, whilst we waited for the rain to stop.

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rising sea levels

I went back to photograph this scene this afternoon with a medium format camera, only to find that it was nothing like it was yesterday afternoon. All the sand, that had provided a balance to the rock in the picture, had gone. We are talking a half a metre of sand that had been washed away by the tide and several levels of rock had been exposed. I was stunned.

moss+rocks

This only confirms to me this kind of global weirding scenario. As I walked along the cliff tops to the beach I could see the sea was swirling around locations on the foreshore that I often photographed in–they were inaccessible.They were surrounded by water and waves crashing over the top of them.

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the little things

I’m down at Victor Harbor nursing a sick poodle who is suffering from a bad bout of hemorrhagic gastroenteritis. Today was the first day I was able to go out on a poodlewalk taking photos since Monday. As Agtet was barely able to walk, I’ve had no luck with large format photography.I was only able to make do walking a short distance with a medium format camera to this spot this afternoon.

grass, rocks, moss

If its the little, humble things that are there in my local commonplaces that are important, then I have to start seeing what is actually there, and then making it into a photo. I have to forget about Suzanne exploring Italy and the romance of old historic places in Europe (eg., Lucca) and concentrate on what is before my eyes.

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a public holiday

I spent the afternoon returning to my commonplaces along the foreshore west of Petrel Cove, near Victor Harbor. Only this time I started working it as a photographer, rather than just taking snaps whilst working through it on a poodlewalk.

creeper rocks, sea

I was looking for possibilities that would work for large format—were accessible for using a heavy duty tripod etc. It was a public holiday and there were too many people and dogs around to use big camera gear and keep an eye on the poodles.

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urban-scapes

I’ve been hunting around the Adelaide CBD looking for some high up locations to take large format urbanscapes. These are few and far between, as the roofs of most buildings in the CBD are inaccessible to the public. The best options so far are the car parks, but these have now been grilled to prevent people from jumping off them.

Franklin St, Adelaide

This is one possibility. It’s easily accessible, is an older style car park with the top roof uncovered and open, and the perspective it offers on Franklin Street is suitable for the Cambo 5×7 view camera. It is the best location that I have found so far.

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a mummy daddy visual language

Photography in the common visual language of the snap shop would be more than an aesthetics of the fragment.This aesthetic has dominated the poetic since the romantics; including the fragment as transmogrified by modernism, high and low, and more recently retooled in the neoclassical form of the citation—ironic and/or decorative—throughout which is called “postmodernism.

Encounter Bay, Victor Harbor

People ofter refer to the common visual language of the snap shop as the mummy daddy language. What is attractive about the visual language of the snapshot is that it is an anti-hierarchical means of organizing knowledge and of recognizing intersections and engagements between seemingly disparate ideas and things.

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snap shots

It has been raining in Adelaide for several days straight now. Autumn has gone, winter has arrived. I’ve been trying to take the 5×7 Cambo out between the showers to get some photos of the tree roots of Morton Bay Figs. But I’ve had no luck.

Meet the Whole Family

Although it is clear blue skies when I leave, the apartment, by the time I get to the location the showers are sweeping across the ground. It clears, but then it is too dark and the light is too flat. So I’m down to quick snaps whilst walking the dogs in the parklands.

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living in a commodity culture

We are surrounded by the images of our commodity culture whether we are watching tv, walking the streets of the city or working on our computers. The visual signs are everywhere.

Our experience is that we live under the assumption that there is no other way of knowing and being outside the phantasmagoriac realm of representation of commodity culture.

mannequin, Rundle Mall, Adelaide

So I photograph these visual forms. We often sleepwalk through their world, barely conscious of the way they speak to our desires or shape our sensory experience. ‘Sleepwalk’ because I often feel that we are living a dream of what it is to be modern in a world of progress (to a better life or future); a dream woven for us by the culture industry of capitalism.

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about monsters

I couldn’t resist taking a photo. The street art appeared on the wall in Wright Street over the weekend. When I saw it I thought of the well-known phrase attributed to Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters.”

I have little idea why I thought that, then and there. It popped into my head.

Be the Bigger Man

Maybe it is because so much street art depicts the monsters. They seem to come from the unconscious. Anyhow, I went back home, grabbed the camera and took a snap, as it was getting dark.

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