urban Archives - Page 6 of 14

November 20, 2012

modern urban grunge

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.

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November 17, 2012

on a tram

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.

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November 10, 2012

a suburban city

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.

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October 29, 2012

snap your city

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.

October 26, 2012

Pitt St car park

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.

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October 25, 2012

exploring Thomas St

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.

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October 15, 2012

wandering Franklin St

I made this picture whilst we were wandering our way to see the Jeffrey Smart exhibition at the Samstag Gallery. We were to meet up with Suzanne and then look over the exhibition.

It took Ari and myself a couple of hours to get there, as we more or less strolled up and down all the little streets and alleyways between Sturt St and the gallery on North Terrace. There was so much to check out.

I was trying to think through a different approach to photographing the city to the bird’s eye view from the top floor of carparks. I was experimenting as we slowly weaved our way in and out of this part of the city, but I didn’t come up with much.

October 7, 2012

in Gilles Street

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:

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.

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September 16, 2012

walking the city

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:

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.

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September 11, 2012

Leigh St, Adelaide

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 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.

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