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.
Ari, Pitt St car park
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.
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.
Thomas St, Adelaide
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.
After returning to Adelaide from painting the weekender at Victor Harbor Ari and I walked the streets of the CBD around the Central Market Precinct. It was the late afternoon walk and I was looking for some ideas to continue working on the Adelaide book.
Cannon St, abstract
Daylight saving had just started and there is now light in the city until after 7pm. Summer is just around the corner. The urban light has changed and become more hard edged. I stay in the shadows more.
Before we returned to to Adelaide from Victor Harbor Ari and I walked amongst the rocks just east of the road to Kings Beach. I was wanting to do more sea abstracts. I recalled that there was an area of the coast with a small stream from the hills flowing through the rock to the sea and that the rock pools had some strange colours.
The pools looked weird and strange. Were they were conducive to being photographed in the late afternoon?
pool abstract
How would the rock pools photograph as abstractions from nature? What kind of abstractions would emerge? I’d been glancing through Lyle Rexer’s The Edge of Vision:The Rise of Abstraction in Photography–it’s the first book in English to document and contextualize this canon.
Though some of the pictures are formal rather than abstract, and are concerned withe the medium of photograpahy I’ve been impressed by the diversity of the work.
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.
Franklin St. Adelaide
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.
The weather has been very stormy at Victor Harbor these last couple of days–cold, wet and very windy. I didn’t bother to do much photography on the morning and evening walks as it was mostly raining on these occasions.
salt abstract, Victor Harbor
The pictures that I did take before the wild weather came in have been deleted. They were mostly sea abstracts that I took for the book I’m working on and they were terrible.
Last week, on one of our back country road walks looking for possible pictures for the conceptual photography book on pink gums and Xanthorrthoea, Ari and I stumbled across this scene:
roadside vege, Mt Hill Rd, Victor Harbor
It looked good on the computer screen–a candidate for the book— and so we went back on the following afternoon to reshoot it with a film camera. But I couldn’t find it, even though I searched everywhere. As I’d deleted most of the pictures on the SONY NEX-7 I couldn’t retrace my steps from the sequence of pictures. I returned the following morning and started from the other direction of the walk to no avail.
Southerly storms have been hitting the southern coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula since Thursday night. The south westerly winds have been very strong whilst the showers of the last day have been frequent and intense. So it is a matter of trying to walk between the showers and staying away from the cliff tops.
We had one such moment yesterday on the late afternoon walk:
grasses, Victor Harbor
We strolled around the Victor Harbor rubbish dump trying to avoid all the mud, and keeping an a eye on the clouds rolling in. We only had 20 minutes or so between the showers. So there wasn’t much chance to experiment with a digital camera.
Ari and I went walking along a back country road west of Victor Harbor yesterday afternoon looking for more material for the conceptual photography book I didn’t find much in the way of the pink gum and Xanthorrhoea combination, but it was an enjoyable walk along Wilson Hill Rd. I found myself wondering how difficult it would be like to take pictures with a digital field view camera. Would it need to be tethered to a computer?
on Wilson Hill Rd, Victor Harbor
This part of the Fleurieu Peninsula region is dairy country and there is very little native bush left. This region been extensively cleared.
Thinking in terms of regionalism—the expression of a type of local identity—recalls the divisions between figuration versus non-figuration, and regionalism versus internationalism in the early 1970s where there was an identification of foreignness with non-figuration that was set against an emerging post-colonial regional cultural identity (Antipodeanism) that did not seek to create a national style.
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.
