I recently wandered into Adelaide's CBD on an early morning walk to photograph the morning light on the eastern face of the sandy colours of the late modernist buildings. Light animates an object and the approach is one of studied snapshots.
The buildings that I photographed were those built around Victoria Square (Tarndayangga) precinct in the 1970s. This kind of focused walk is the opposite of just going out into the CBD one fine autumn morning, shooting on some random theme and then hoping that something emerges. If you are not careful that is the pathway to photo-wooze ---ie., lots of boring images of nothing much at all.
This particular supplement to the Walking Adelaide website broadens this recent post on Keswick Creek.
The supplement takes the form of some additional photos of Keswick Creek in a different locations in the old industrial area of Mile End. These additional photos came from walking around the area tracing the creek whilst looking for suitable locations to scope for a large format photo session at a latter date. These locations below are ones that are prone to flooding.
The picture below photo of the creek, or rather a culvert, is on the western side of the Flinders and Seaford railway line, and it is looking towards the Adelaide Showgrounds. I came across it whilst looking for where the underground culvert in the showgrounds surfaced as it went through the Keswick Army Barracks to Anzac Highway.
I was lucky that day. There is very limited access to the location as the gate for the Keswick Army Barracks is usually closed as I discovered on subsequent visits. Access to the barracks would be restricted. Moreover, the protective wire netting fence across the culvert means that a large format monorail cannot be used. Only 35mm as you need to be able to poke the lens through the smallish holes in the wire netting.
As there is now a walking Adelaide website with its own blog this old, low-key blog became superfluous. It served its purpose in kickstarting the website into existence, and as a result, it hasn't been updated in 2 years. Originally this low-fi blog was envisioned as a way to start making a photobook of urban photography of Adelaide. I had in mind that the images and text would be the raw material for the photo book. However, as I left living in Adelaide for the coast and the money ran out for a book, I decided to build the website. The next step in the project is a photobook.
My reason for reviving the old blog is that I've returned to the city in the sense of I've started regularly walking the city again. I have also linked up to, and joined, the Australian Walking Artists group, since urban photography has been historically based on the medium of walking the city. Adelaide 's CBD has changed a lot in the last 8 years.
This revived blog will include the odd photo that doesn't make it to the official website. Toss away photos, odd balls, rejects, poor mages. fragments or scraps, if you like. Ones that stand outside the website and are an accessory (the parergon) to the main work (the ergon). This blog would then exist on the margins of the website.
The photos and text, which are degraded supplements to the original image that lies buried in the darkness of the archive on a computer's hard drive, are deemed to have little value in the neo-liberal image economy. They are toss-a-ways, as is this blog, since blogs have been shunted aside in the culture of social media.
I took advantage of a recent dental appointment in Adelaide's CBD to walk the city and to try and make some photographic urbanscapes. I started out from my base in the Adelaide Central Market where I'd had my morning coffee and went nto the Pitt Street carpark to check out Franklin St:
I thought that I'd return to some of my old locations in the various car parks that I'd visited and explored when I lived in the city prior to 2015 and this was a good a way as any to gain a quick perspective on how the CBD had changed, if at all, between 2015 and 2022.
I briefly explored in and around Gawler Place in the hour or so that I had between meetings in Adelaide's CBD on Wednesday (18th May). This exploration focused less on the empty shops or offices themselves, and more on the urban space of the street that included the empty offices.
More specifically, it was the interface space between the inside of the building and the street outside the building along with its various reflections in the glass windows of the buildings. What could be called thresholds.
I've realized whilst constructing the Walking Adelaide demo website on the Square Space publishing platform that this is going to take me quite some time. Realistically, I will need all of the six months allowed by the demo to construct a skeleton of the project that would be ready to go public.
Whilst working on building the demo website I remembered that I'd walked around more than Adelaide's car-centric CBD. I had spent a lot of time walking the edgelands in, and around, the Port Adelaide precinct in the 1980s. This example is from the archives:
The picture was made on the Grand Trunkway near the Torrens Island power station. We are looking north east towards the Adelaide hills. What appeared to be wetlands was being used as, or had become, an industrial wasteland. It is a good example of edgelands in 1980s industrial Adelaide.
The recent brute force attacks and hacks to two of my Wordpress blogs --Thoughtfactory and Mallee Routes --- have caused me to start to look at Square Space for re-building the Walking Adelaide project. Rebuilding because this project has basically outgrown Posthaven's simple blog format. It needs galleries, blog and text and so rather than building another Wordpress site I am considering Square Space. There is more on this at the Thoughtfactory blog.
The galleries, blog and text would be designed to give the project more depth.
Post-Covid Adelaide is different to the one that I lived and photographed in during the second decade of the 21st century. As noted in earlier posts there are fewer people on the streets of the CBD. Whilst walking around the northern part of the CBD last Tuesday (26th April) I noticed that the only section of the city that had lots of people moving around was the north-west end of the CBD, and these were students at the Uni of SA
I still find it a depressing experience walking Adelaide's CBD post-Covid. Many of the lunch time cafe's and coffee shops continue to remain closed. Will they ever open again? Will the pandemic shape Adelaide's future? What might urban life look like on the other side of the Covid-19 pandemic? How long before the CBD starts to be full of people?
Judging from the lack of people in the city it appears that many of the office workers are still working from home. The density of the people in the city is certainly much less than in pre-Covid times and about half those walking the streets are wearing masks. It was such a marked difference to Melbourne where hardly anyone wore face masks on the street.
I spent Wednesday in the week before Xmas walking the city and taking photo for several hours. I had parked the car near the Adelaide parklands and walked to the Adelaide Central Market. After a coffee in the Central Market I spent the next 4-5 hours walking around the north western side of the CBD, starting at the nearby Post Office Lane.
Then I wandered and photographed along "Westpac Lane", which runs off Topham Mall, returning to old haunts to get my bearings. Some people were wearing masks on the street, most were using the QR codes on their phones and many were keeping a safe distance. Though South Australia's closed borders had meant that it was a zero Covid state, people were going about their business without the twinkle, shimmer and buzz of the approaching festive season.
I have been going through my digital archives circa 2013 /2014 in order to start to look for, and select, material for the proposed Adelaide book. This builds on The Bowden Archives and Industrial Modernity book which I am currently completing. Sadly, there was less visual material in the 2013 photographic archive than I remembered or hoped for. I was disappointed, but I did come across this mugshot poster by Peter Drews.
The argument in the introduction is that photography was substantively associated with the modernist city in the 20th century. There was a historical relationship between urban spaces, urban representations and the photographic/cinematic form. Photography was part of the experience of modernity, especially that on the flâneur, or citystroller, a figure of modernity characterised by their detached observations of urban life, being simultaneously of the city, and yet distanced from it by their spectatorial gaze.
