Blog
unfamiliar territory
I have lost confidence in this project because I realize that I an longer familiar with the city in terms of its urban atmosphere, its people flow, light and shade and location of suitable subjects in its various alley ways. I have to relearn everything.
gravestones, texts, bodysnatching
Some gravestones in Adelaide’s West Terrace Cemetery have been constructed as if they are pages in a book to be read. So they are historical texts to be interpreted.
Late Autumn
Unlike many in 2024 I was able to enter the property market in the 1980s. Today it is very difficult to get a foot in the door.
a post-Covid city
Was Covid-19 an interruption — a one-off pandemic —- to the emerging urban renaissance in Adelaide?
Grungy Adelaide
I spent 5 hours walking Adelaide’s CBD yesterday. I couldn’t help notice how dirty the city was, especially in those side streets and alleyways away from the main streets.
empty shops/spaces
One notable characteristic of post-Covid Adelaide is the large number of empty shops, spaces and offices in the CBD.
puzzling media
0n my last walk in Adelaide in December 2022 I adopted a classic approach. I wandered the streets with a Leica M4 rangefinder and black and white film. Just like I used to do in the late twentieth century.
Surreal moments
A capitol city that continues to remain half empty is surreal. Other surreal moments then appear; moments that refer back to the shop windows and shop fronts in Paris photographed by Eugène Agtet,
Photography, light, the city
The Language of Light and Dark: Light and Place in Australian Photography by Melissa Miles explicitly addresses photography and the modern city
Photography and time
Photography's capacity to freeze and preserve time has been seen as one of its central characteristics. Yet Adelaide is constantly changing as it transitions from an industrial city to a post-industrial one. Can photography represent time in the form of change?
The Photograph and Australia
Though Judy Annear’s text The Photography and Australia is a photographic project that aims too provide the conceptual and historical aspects in terms of people, place, culture and history it oddly ignores the city as one of its themes.
Post-Covid Adelaide
The city centre or CBD is full of vacant shops, and there are a striking number of office buildings that still lie empty. The disruption and decay that has affected people’s immediate urban environment appears most visibly with the increasing homelessness in the form of people now living in their cars or sleeping rough in the street.
The past repeats
If “post-Covid” Adelaide has similar aspects to that the 1990s then a considerable amount of baggage from the past seems to gave been deeply and often subconsciously internalised” within the people
Black + White
I have started to photograph in black and white was well as in colour, thereby reconnecting with my 1980’s Adelaide photography.
Reflecting
When I left Adelaide I realized that my time living in Sturt St was during and after the global financial crisis of 2007 -8.
Leaving the city
We left living in Sturt St in tAdelaide’s CBD in early 2015 to live on the coast at Encounter Bay.
Urban reflections
One of the interesting features of the city as you walk around are the urban reflections.