I have been walking the CBD whilst I’ve been staying in Adelaide a few days a week and I’ve become aware that I am struggling with the Walking Adelaide project in the post-Covid city. Though people have returned —it’s not the empty city anymore— I have lost any sense of the rhythms, the atmosphere, or the light in the city. The CBD is no longer familiar to me as it once was when I was living at Sturt St in the first decade and half of the 21st century, and I was daily walking with the poodles around the CBD and the parklands.

I thought that I could just pick up from where I’d left off and that would do more large format urban photography with the 5x4 Sinar P2 than I previously did. Hence putting the Sinar together over a number of years, since it was more versatile for urban architecture than my old yaw prone 5x7 Cambo S3. This is an anachronistic mode — an obsolescent medium and outmoded form — within the pervasive contemporary digital culture.

What I have discovered during my wanderings in the CBD during this year is that I just don’t know the city anymore, and so I find myself drifting aimlessly around the familiar streets trying to get to know it again. I haven’t been able to pick up on, or even restart, the large format urban photography. That just hasn’t eventuated, much to my dismay, even though I have been concentrating on location searching.

I have come across some possible sites, but I then forget where they are and struggle to find them again. When I do find them I discover that they are either been covered with graffiti, or the light has substantially changed as I’m now in a different season — summer as opposed to winter, for instance.

The architectural picture above is a case in point. It was backward looking, historically layered, and empty of people. A discarded object of history. The outmoded.

The scoping study of this location was made in a winter afternoon. It took me a while to assess the digital image on the computer screen to judge whether it would be suitable for a 5x. Then there was lots of wandering to find this location again as it was just not where I remembered it. I found it recently but it was being blasted by the summer light in the late afternoon. Summer is dry, hot and sunny in Adelaide and the subtle light/shadow tonality of the architecture was completely washed out.

The upshot is that I have currently lost confidence in my capacity to continue to develop the Walking Adelaide project into new possibilities. I cling to the past — what I know —- as an anchor point, but the past has changed. It’s a different city to the one that I knew a decade ago. It has become unfamiliar territory. I find myself disorientating and out of synch with the urban now.

I am unsure what a contemporary urban photography is, when it is different to traditional street photography, which judging from Flickr continues to be a spontaneous response to everyday public life with its style of taking photographs on the wing and shooting from the hip premised on individual expression and artistic subjectivity.

Walking Adelaide’s reference to, and emergence from, the Bowden Archives means that it has something to do with the abandoned and discarded objects of history; a making sense of the traces and fragments that remain and endure; has a backward-looking gaze that uses outdated media; and is a late work that enables us to see that which survives has not disappeared forever, but remains buried and obscured. That is what I have recovered from the past and try to hang onto as I wander the city.

unfamiliar territory

gravestones, texts, bodysnatching