The empty cafes , offices and restaurants in the CBD are taking on a surreal quality. The restaurants, for instance, are all set up for the lunch trade, but there is no one there. The present setup refers back to the past — pre-Covid times — and to a possible post-Covid future. The expectation is that things will come good.

In the banal image of an empty restaurant time is suspended as a new wave of the Covid-19 virus sweeps through the city of Adelaide. The cases and deaths from the Omicron variant of the Covid virus continue to mount but they now appear to lack public significance. They are accepted as the way things are.

Though, shoppers and office workers are returning to the CBD in increasing numbers, lunch time for them appears to consist of a takeaway from the small Asian (ChInese and Vietnamese) cafes that have sprung up. People wait patiently in line in the street to enter the “wall cafe” to order their lunch and then take it away. A large number of the upmarket restaurants remain closed. Will they open again? What is going to happen to the empty offices? How will those spaces be reinvented?

It is a surreal experience currently walking the city. A capitol city that continues to remain half empty is beyond the bounds of accustomed normality. Everyday reality is transformed. The pre-Covid Adelaide is increasingly a memory. Should we be mourning what has been lost?Our memory is that 2020, when the pandemic began, was a headlong, vaccine-less descent away from normality and into calamity. We were torn from our established ways, undergoing separation, loss, and upheaval. 2021, with its widespread availability of vaccines, saw the re-emergence of weddings, dining, travel, and sports. Though these coexisted alongside vaccine holdouts, breakthrough infections, new variants, booster shots, and violent politics.it i now clear that we will never be entirely free of COVID-19 and that post-pandemic the world will be very different to the one we knew.

Another surreal moment appears in shop windows: moments that refer back to the shop windows and shop fronts in early twentieth Paris as photographed by Eugène Agtet. Photographs that were then picked up by the Surrealists in the 1930s.

I’ve always been taken by Atget’s photos and I never interpreted him as a documentary photographer who is primarily involved in the camera’s descriptive capabilities of the subject matter. The Surrealist interpretation holds that Atget’s photos evoke the poetry of the city. On Walter Benjamin’s reading or critical engagment with Surrealism what is evoked is the spectacle of the shopfront windows and the allure of such consumer objects. The everyday is saturated with the marvellous, a lyrically intense dream-world in which arises the basis for a ‘mythology of the mundane objects of everyday life. The mythology of the modern commodity in providing happiness, identity and spiritual fulfilment.

It is ironic that Breton’s defence of surrealist visual art in ‘Surrealism and Painting,’ paid little attention to photography. The subsequent written history of surrealist art also focused on painting and drawing, ignoring the important presence of a wide range of photographic material to be found in surrealist journals. Photography was actually central to surrealist art as was argued by both Rosalind Krauss and Mary Livingston in L’Amour fou and Ian Walker in City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris.

Adelaide has a strong heritage of Surrealism—the early paintings of Geoffrey Smart, such as Holiday Resort (1946) and Robe (1947), Wallaroo (1951). There is the seminal work of Dušan and Voitre Marek. Their Czech-nurtured variant with its deep roots in poetry incorporated paintings, drawings, sculpture, films, prints, photography and jewellery. It is a rich heritage to refer back to, and draw upon, in whilst living with the potential long- term consequences Covid in a post pandemic world. More generally in Australian surrealism there was the genre of ‘wasteland cities’,—eg., Albert Tucker’s Futile City

Surreal moments

puzzling media

Photography, light, the city