In the interlude between leaving Adelaide to live on the coast in 2015 and my return to briefly photographing in the city several years latter in 2018 I realized that I had been living in Adelaide’s CBD before, during, and after the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-8. Hence the desolate vibe of things turned anxious and bad. Adelaide was seen as drab, boring and backward. It was outside the national cultural rebirth, renewal and the progressive cultural identity of the Australian nation emerging from the waning hold of tradition.

Adelaide was just recovering a street life, people were coming to live in the city and new apartment buildings were being built when we left in 2015. It was becoming a post-industrial city and the industrial and modernist city was fading into the past. This transition was a turning point in South Australia’s history, even if we put the nation’s narrative of modernity of marching ever forward in a “telic” trajectory of rational and thus implicitly secular progress to one side.

Walter Benjamin’s Paris and Berlin in the early 20th century and his writings of Baudelaire, photography and the Surrealists had guided my understanding of modernity, photography and the city as a way to make sense of the multiple crises facing Australia in the late 20th century and the early decades of the 21st century A century has passed since these signposts of the flâneur had helped to guide a project of thinking the nation’s modernity through walking and photographing a regional, capital city in Australia.

If the flâneur was history, then what stayed with me was Benjamin’s ideas that sensuous forms signify more than their materiality, that the image embodies meaning in a sensuous form and that the detritus of ordinary life contains note-worthy meaning. Benjamin’s Arcade project highlighted that the material sensuous forms may bear signiﬁcant meanings, that these images embody experience-able historical truth, and that history is a form of remembrance. If digital technologies and social media are now central to our daily lives, then these deepen the image’s embodiment of uncertain or ambiguous meanings that also encapsulates narratives. The image is a sensuous form that tells a story and is readable.

This is a different understanding of Benjamin and photography than Susan Sontag’s interpretation in her On Photography, where she writes that 'photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle-class flâneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by Baudelaire. The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitring, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.’ (On Photography, London: Penguin, 2002 p. 55). The photographer is a hunter hunting down his prey. The camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder—a soft murder. The photographer patiently waits for its “prey” to let its guard down before pouncing.

During 2015 and 2017 period I connected my urban exploration of Adelaide and Benjamin’s signposts to the Surrealists ideas of playful activity, the random stroll in the overlooked and neglected parts of the city, the destruction of one’s city, and the city street as the site of the uncanny, the coincidental and the unexpected. Walking was a means to reclaim the streets for pedestrians. This was then linked to Guy Debord’s familiar figure of the walker aimlessly drifting (dérive) through the different spaces of the city with their distinct atmospheres or ambiances. This drifting disregarded the traditional and habitual practices of the tourist, or the white collar worker walking to work.

Reflecting

Black + White

Leaving the city