0n my last walk in Adelaide in December 2022 when the weather was still temperate I adopted a classic urban photographic approach. I wandered the streets with a Leica M4 rangefinder, a 35mm Summicron lens and black and white film. Just like I used to do in the late twentieth century when I wanted to take a break from writing my PhD. Actually, it was the same camera that I had used back then —- the only difference was that it had recently been repaired.

This photographic nostalgia also included looking around for urban or public poster art on the walls of the back alleyways of the city, or occasionally the walls of the main streets.

I understood this return to what I used to do in terms of looking for the cultural sites of resistance or opposition in the city by the street artists or students at the art school as the muckraking political art of the day. Only this time around the monochrome images break through the monotony of visual saturation around us, thereby creating a sense of nostalgia in the present. As an aesthetic rooted in the past, black and white photography when applied to the present, visually codes images as archival though connecting place to memory.

What would the political art look like in the 3rd decade of the 21st century I wondered? Would it be post-colonial? Would it recover Australia’s forgotten colonial history and its culture of silence about the dispossession of the indigenous people from their land? Would it support changing the Australian constitution to recognizing and acknowledging the aboriginal people as the first nation people who had been here long before the white settlers invaded the continent? Would it be about the recent bush fires and floods caused by climate heating? Or the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nope. Nothing like that at all.

As I was photographing this poster in Trades Hall Lane near the Adelaide Central Market a middle class, professional woman who was passing by, stopped, looked and asked me in a puzzling voice : “What do you think that poster means?” I responded, “Honestly, I don’t really know. I’m as puzzled as you. I’ve seen these kind of of posters spread around the city. I find them rather strange and somewhat off putting”. She looked me , nodding in agreement, then replied, “Must be someone from the local art school’’, and continued on her way to Grote Street and disappeared around the corner.

I didn’t know anything about the Wazted Youth street artist and the subsequent googling doesn’t help much . There is a photo on the Flickr Adelaide graffiti group but it is without any details or commentary. A more intensive google search suggest references to a hard core punk, a post-punk Goth band, or to Meatloaf and Jim Steinman‘s Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell, or a play on the wasted youth who are literally wasting their youth away but are supercool?

What struck me was the poster’s image-text relationship (with its sense of melancholia) that breached the rhetorical barriers conventionally placed between poetry and the visual arts '; a relationship in which the words are a verbal representation of the visual representation. There is a sense of a dialogue, exchange or encounter between these two media: the words ‘wazted youth’ are a cryptic poem about the photography. Given that example of ekphrasis it is not clear from the poster what it is that youth has lost: is it throwing their life away because of drugs? Or because of mental illness, such as depression? Hence the melancholia and the anger about the loss? A sense of trauma that depends by the repression of an earlier memory or event? This suggests an understanding of the city and thus the urban ﬁeld as having been, in part, constituted by repression and thus by a form of systematic forgetting.

And my photographic nostalgia? Maybe I do not desire the place of my youth but my youth itself: my desire is a search for the time and not for the thing to be recovered. My nostalgia is a memory event of a lost time that preserves both the possibility and impossibility of an idealized period of my past. The impossibility of a return to such a non-existent place is what perpetuates my longing.

puzzling media

empty shops/spaces

Surreal moments