In Australia these dirty realist novels of inner-urban angst explored the lives of the disenfranchised young people who lived there; gritty, dirty, real existences, eked out in a world of disintegrating futures where the only relief from ever-present boredom was through a nihilistic pursuit of sex, violence, drugs and alcohol.
As a photographer my perspective comes from grunge design –dirty stains, torn images, “broken” icons and creased pieces of paper. It’s a dirty, dark, old, gloomy and grimy rather than strange and creepy. Brown, beige, grey and black replace the vibrant shades of vivid colors.
It is the antithesis to the gloss and surface sheen of the commodity culture of the mass media and the corporate world; the underbelly that remains unseen and is represented as the unclean and violent that need to be controlled.
Adelaide continues to remains frozen in the 1980s.