I spent several hours walking the streets of Adelaide before driving back to Encounter Bay after my dentist appointment in the CBD this week. I wore a face mask whilst wandering the street to protect myself from the recent BA.5 Omicron variant of Covid-19 that is sweeping through Australia. This dominant variant is more infectious, can evade antibodies, and it is more likely to target the lower respiratory system than the other Omicron variants. The pandemic is not in the past as deaths are rising.

On this walk I started to make a few black and white photos as well as the usual colour ones. I felt that some of the subject matter that I was seeing on previous wanderings suited a black and white approach. So I decided to explore some b+w possibilities in a CBD that I am still finding depressing.

The black and white approach was also a reconnecting with my past photography — that of the late 1980s and early 1990s which was analogue and solely black and white. During my recent wanderings in 2022 I started remembering those of the previous century. The latter was equally a depressing period in Adelaide, due to the recession of 1990 and the collapse of the State Bank in SA in 1991. This was one result of the deregulation of the Australian financial sector and the globalisation of the Australian economy.

It was very tentative exploration of black and white approach to photographing Adelaide though. I was only photographing the occasional empty shop with my old Leica M4, which I used to photograph with in the 1980s. Its broken rangefinder mechanism had recently been repaired by Leica.

The depressing, grimy dimension to Adelaide’s CBD these days is one of the consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has hit the small shops, cafes, restaurants and offices very hard. The crowds are returning to the CBD, but many of the small business have not reopened. Nor does it look as if they will in the near future.

Black and white — whether digital or analogue —- suits the gritty and run down interiors of some of the empty shops and cafes in the CBD.

The black and white experiment looks good whether it be digital or analogue. The first two images in the post are colour digital files converted to b+w whilst the third image is an analogue negative that was made with the Leica M4 and scanned into a digital file. All look okay and so justify my decision to walking around the city carrying two cameras — a digital and a film one.