A lo fi visual diary
I have been plugging taking photos of my local urban neighbourhood without giving much thought to what I’m doing apart from thinking that it is something to do with architecture.
I was kinda doing architectural photography intuitively I told myself, but when I actually came to consciously do architectural photography the results, more often than not, were disastrous.
Then I stumbled upon the newly formed Urban Photo Magazine group on Flickr and I could see people doing similar work to me.
Tim Horton, the Integrated Design Commissioner for South Australia, has said that too often the idea of vernacular in architecture is dogmatically applied to a Disney-like preconception of quaint pioneering shopfronts and the purse-lipped Georgian strait jacket and is rarely translated into the 21st century convincingly (we’ve all seen the historicist townhouse dwarfed by the three car garage grafted on the front).
He adds that the future of Adelaide’s city form needs to be modeled on a more sustainable response to our climate, not the Centenary picture book, circa 1936, and not a forced idyll long since departed.
If these are accurate observation, then we don’t seem to be getting in the buildings for businesses, and residences a shift in Adelaide that is a sustainable response to our environment. Nor is the urban form being reinvented for the 21st century. What we have is piecemeal ad-hockery.
I’m so annoyed with the pro-lab processing of my 5×4 film negatives that I had taken in Tasmania–some of them have very matted skies that I cannot correct using Adobe Lightroom. All that bloody expense in getting the gear to Tasmania and then the film and processing. It hurts, big time.
Those with no sky–ie., detail—were okay, and they delivered the detail I wanted.
So I have switched to digital for the moment, while I lick my wounds. Though I’ve gone back to exploring large format possibilities in the Port Adelaide project, I am very hesitant to shoot urbanscapes with skies in large format after being burned by the results of the Tasmanian work.
I’ve kinda lost my confidence with large format, as it is proving much more difficult to pull off than I’d imagined. It’s less a simple step up from medium format than a big leap, and I’ve lost my footing in making the leap.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t do that much street photography, even though I live in the heart of this lawyer precinct in Adelaide. I’ve never had the confidence doing this genre with 35m film, let alone using medium format. It is pretty much hit and miss for me and film is too expensive for this kind of work.
Digital makes it so much easier to experiment and I can check the results on the spot whilst I wait for the next person to move into the urban space I’ve selected. Its convenient. However, the fundamental underpinning is very simple—film and its processing cost money, digital does not.
With the latter you can correct mistakes right away, experiment, try new approaches or techniques and have fun—and do so at no additional cost. It’s a no brainer.
One of the intriguing aspects of the central market precinct in Adelaide is the heritage buildings that have been preserved and used by the lawyers. It is my local neighbourhood and I often think about how can we respect and celebrate our heritage and meld it with an exciting future. Yet I rarely take photos of it.
I decided that needed to change from taking the sporadic photo. I would force myself to start looking at the precinct as a photographer as opposed to being an inhabitant or local who works, lives, shops, and plays in the precinct.
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.
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.
Our responses to adverts in the city is often a blase one. In moving around the city we rarely distinguish individual advertisements from those of other campaigns and rarely `read’ the advertisement in a classic sense. It’s a defensive mode.
This is in spite or advertising companies producing urban mappings of the trajectories, speeds, social groups, and experiences in ways that are instrumentally oriented towards selling or promoting those urban `texts’ they write as efficient consumer-targeting material.
As its been raining off and on in Adelaide this past week my photography has consisted of taking a few quick snaps of the banksia in a pot in the townhouses’ corner balcony that overlooks Sturt St. My photographic time has been spent in front of the computer working on archival photos that I’ve scanned.
The walks during the week have been done between the showers as much as possible. Today is the first sign that the rain depression may be lifting. We have both sun and rain alternating today.