The origins of the walking and photographing the city project was when we were living in a townhouse in Sturt Street in the CBD of Adelaide and I was walking the standard poodles in and around the city. This was around 2010 and as the townhouse was near the Adelaide Central Market I would walk the poodles around the city and the parklands in the morning and in the afternoon. I would carry a small digital camera with me (a Sony NEX-7) and take photos as I walked.

The walking in the city was a form of drifting or meandering as where we walked was often dictated by the poodles wandering down alleyways and cul de sacs that I would normally pass by if I was walking in the city on my own. My kind of walking was very purposeful as I would be going to a specific destination. I would take the most direct route and I would avoid being sidetracked.

I took photos on the poodlewalks without being conscious of working on an art project, how these fragmentary snapshots related to the history of art photography after the demise of modernism and postmodernism, or the narration of the nation and modernity. I was aware , however, that this kind of photography and walking referred back to the realist urban photography that I did in the 1980s when I was living in Bowden. At that time I would walk into the city along the River Torrens with Fichte, then wander aimlessly around the CBD, taking photos, then walk back to Bowden. There was no attempt to link this urban photography to Australian national identity, the radical nationalist tradition, or to the Australian photographic tradition of the role of light in envisioning modern cities as places of dreams and wonder.

I posted the early poodlewalk’s images after 2010 on a free Wordpress blog in a diary format. That blog was deleted when we left Sturt St in 2016 to live in Encounter Bay on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. Those posts were imported into the blog of the new poodlewalks website, but only the text came across. The poodlewalks were now along the coast and in the local bushland, and they no longer took place in the city apart from the occasional visits to the Adelaide parklands.

I started a walking Adelaide blog on the Posthaven publishing platform circa 2012, and I continued to publish the photos from walking Adelaide on my frequent visits to the city. The idea was to put some material together and publish a DIY book on Blurb. That never happened. The walking Adelaide project eventually outgrew a blog format, as I became aware of the historical European writings on photography, the city and modernity and the contemporary walking art projects.

Background of project

The Photographer as flâneur