a leaf

Our poodlewalks are severely restricted whilst we are in the city.

We walk down Sturt St to Whitmore Square around 9am; take the car to Veale Gardens at 1pm and walk to Veale Gardens at 6pm. We are restricted by the long spell of the late summer heat and Raffi not being able to walk very far in the heat. So we just go to places like Whitmore Square and Veale Gardens where he can safely play off lead in the shadows of the trees.

leaf on pavement
leaf on pavement

I take what photos I can, but my options are very limited as I am basically a dog carer. This picture was taken on a day late last week when it rained. Now we are in a 14 day heatwave.

a digital disruption

When I was walking around city west yesterday I couldn’t help but think about the digital disruption that is going to happen in the near future. This will be less from the proposed free wireless in the city and more from the National Broadband Network facilitating the digital economy.

photographer
photographer

What prompted these thoughts was the construction site of the University of South Australia’s new Learning Centre. I couldn’t help but think that many in the area have little idea of the forthcoming digital disruption.

Wright St, Adelaide

I walk past this building almost everyday and I’ve been wondered how to photograph it. This photo was made early on a weekday morning around 6.30am before there was any one around. There was just a security guard collecting money from the parking meters and she was hostile. Security guards are just suspicious of photographers these days.

I also look at the beginnings of the redevelopment of an open car lot to its left along Frew Street. It is an affordable housing project. Most of the year has been taken up with digging out the contaminated soil and replacing it.

Wright Street, Adelaide
Wright Street, Adelaide

I understand that the development will done in several stages, and it will allow low and moderate income households to live in the CBD. It is part of the Council’s strategy to encourage more people to live in “a vibrant, populous and sustainable Capital City built upon Adelaide’s heritage and lifestyle”.

urban grunge

This architectural urban decay is locked behind a fence that protects a private carpark for those working in the lawyer precinct. It is difficult to gain access to the car park because the gate is always closed and operated by a card. I was allowed in because Ari did his cute act.

Adelaide
Adelaide

The site is earmarked for development–glass tower office blocks, judging from the advertising. Nothing much is happening, even though this site is in the heart of the CBD in the central market precinct.

Nth Terrace reflections

Ari and I went wandering down the west part of the CBD. I had to drop a book— Formless: a user’s guide by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss-— off at the University of South Australia library library and I wanted to scope the new South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute centre (SAHMRI) currently being built on Nth Terrace.

Nth Terrace reflections

I’ve tried a few of the more conventional or modernist approaches to photographing the SAHMRI but none have worked. I’ve been frustrated by this as the restricted access to the site provides a photographer with little options.

Maybe this can help to make the shift away from a Greenbergian high modernism that emphasises “significant form,” “the autonomy of the work of art,” “pure visuality,” “transcendence,” the quest for “the essential,” etc without embracing the anti-aesthetic position of postmodernism in the arts.

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.

Franklin St development

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.

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.

Adelaide City Council

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.

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.

white building

However, the traditional Australian backyard is disappearing more rapidly from new suburban estates on the urban fringe than it is from established middle suburbs.

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, Adelaide

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.

scoping Bentham Street, Adelaide

I haven’t done much photography on poodlewalks in the last couple of weeks. I have been preparing work for the Shimmer Festival organized by the City of Onkaparinga. I did manage to take a few location shots for a large format shoot with the Sony NEX-7. The location for the scoping was yet another carpark with iron bars to prevent people in a state of despair from jumping off.

Bentham St, Adelaide

It used to be the case that art photography was measured according to the conventions and aesthetic values of the painted image. The latest defence of that position was provided American formalist modernism. But that has changed now, as in the late 20th century the strict modernist boundaries between photography and other media like sculpture, painting or performance became increasingly porous–ie., with postmodernism.