Walking/photographing Adelaide

Covid's empty shops

I have tentatively made a return to the project of walking the city of Adelaide with a hand held camera. This project has been tentatively put on the backburner for some time. Walking the city with a large format camera and a heavy tripod has definitely been placed on the back burner.

This recent experience persuaded me to think about picking it up. I briefly looked at the archives. I decided that it would make a good break from sitting in front of the computer working on the text for The Bowden Archives and Industrial Modernity book. Then I realized that the Walking Adelaide project, which is about urban psychogeography, could be interpreted as building upon this body of photographs from the 1980s, which form the third section of The Bowden Archives. There are a lot of photos from the time when we lived in the CBD, but I am unsure how to conceptually organise them into a book project. That is why this project has been on the back burner with only a blog as its public face.

So off I went on a tentative foray to Adelaide's CBD last Thursday (7th October). Below is a cafe in Hindmarsh Square next to the old central office of SA Health. This cafe used to be quite buzzy:

There were a lot of people sitting around in the square as it was a warm sunny spring day. I would have thought this mass would have kept the cafe open, given that there is currently no Covid-19 community transmission in South Australia.

I spend a couple of hours walking the CBD -- just a playful, drifting aimlessly around (dérive ) in good Situationist fashion. The city was very quiet even though I was walking between 11am and 1 pm -- ie., around lunch time. Many of the cafes had gone, most of the restaurants in the Rundle St East strip were closed, and there were many empty spaces for rent in the CBD. Some of the fashion shops had gone and there was only the odd customer in the ones that were open. These are strange times compared to even this time.

Post Office Lane

Recently I wandered through some of my film archives for the Adelaide part of the Bowden Archives and Other Marginalia project. I was using it as a way to take a break from the grind of substantially reworking the text for this Adelaide/Port Adelaide part of the book. I am finding the reworking of the text for each section hard going, as the early drafts of the texts have little coherence by way of an argument. It is a humbling experience.

Whilst exploring the archives I came across some b+w photos that I made for the Walking Adelaide project. I had completely forgotten about these photos. These street views were usually photographed in colour and I'd forgotten that on occasions I was also photographing them in b + w at the same time.

An example is this picture of Post Office Lane, which runs between Franklin and Waymouth Streets. I was standing in Post Office Lane and the photo would have been made early in the morning.

At the time the photo was made I was photographing the empty streets in the CBD. My conception of Adelaide then was that its street life was pretty minimal. The time period is roughly a decade ago when I was living in the CBD.

old and new

I finally had some time to spend a few hours wandering around, and photographing in, the CBD last week. The CBD is rapidly changing from when I used to live there.

The few hours of photographic drifting was between seeing the Marek brothers exhibition --- Dušan and Voitre Marek: Surrealists at sea -- at the South Australian Art Gallery and receiving the 1st AstraZeneca vaccination at my GP clinic. The Morrison Federal Govt has been very slack in acquiring and rolling out the vaccine, and my GP clinic has only been receiving very limited doses per week. Sadly, exaggerated claims, spin and outright lies have covered over the stuff up re the vaccine supply and roll out.

Back to the exhibition. There was a deep resistance to the foreign, the European, and modernism in postwar Adelaide and the migrant artists in the European diaspora were consigned to obscurity. They represent by-ways, irrelevancies, alternative pathways – all leading to dead ends in the central narrative of Australian art history. For instance, Sasha Grishin's recent Australian Art: A History does not mention the Marek brothers, despite their influence on the early paintings of Jeffrey Smart.

The Surrealist at Sea exhibition finally recovers, and recognizes, some of the forgotten modernism in Adelaide after the 1945. An example of this forgetting is Patrick McCaughey's recent Strange Country: Why Australia Painting Matters, which ignores Surrealism in Australia, and doesn't mention the Marek brothers. McCaughey's text is both Melbourne-centric and ignores how some modernists, such as the Marek brothers worked across several artistic mediums and not just in the medium of painting. In the Marek brothers case it was painting, sculpture, prints, film, photography and jewellery.

archive: urban textures

I have started to walk around photographing Adelaide's CBD after an absence of six years or so.The city has become a very different one during the negative consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. I realized that, in contrast, the pandemic has not substantially altered the way the retirees living on the coast in Victor Harbor and other coastal towns. The retirees go about their lives in a similar way to what they were doing in pre-pandemic days. They can't travel overseas like they used to, or visit family interstate as easily as they once could.

I also decided to revisit my photographic archives as I am now quite distant from the photographs I made when I was living in the CBD. I can look at them as photos in themselves, as I cannot longer remember the experiences of that photographic moment. I came across this abstract image of peeling bark in the Adelaide Parklands. It was made whilst I was on a poodlewalk in Veal Gardens:

Walking through Veal Gardens was an integral part of one kind of poodlewalk in the southern parklands. For the poodles it was all about the possums in the trees.

South Road: An experiment 1

I have often thought about walking along Adelaide's South Rd in the late afternoon taking photos of this urban stretch. I drive along this road every time I go to and from Adelaide to Encounter Bay. It looks interesting with all the different signs, architecture and colours. It's all mixed up, chaotic jumble.

However, South Rd is Adelaide's main north south corridor and at peak hour it is jammed with cars in the late afternoon. It is noisey and full of fumes, and so I have backed off walking along it. Breathing all those fumes would not be good for one's health. Still, I find photographing South Rd in the late afternoon winter light intriguing.

I tried an experiment recently: --taking photos through a car window. The opportunity arose when we were returning from Blinman after being on a camel trek from Blinman to Lake Frome, as I was sitting in the back seat and Suzanne was driving towards the Southern Expressway.

I wound the back window on the left side of the car down. The basic concept was simple: to take a photo when the car stopped in traffic. It is unlike the Conceptual artists of the 1960s. They preconceived a conceptual project that they then carries out with photographs. However, photography was only useful or interesting to them insofar as it was instrumental in conveying or recording their ideas. These artists describe the photographs themselves as either brute information or uninflected documentation. The 1960s conceptual tradition held photography as a specific medium with its rich history and formal conventions at arm’s length.

windows onto

This photo comes from when wandered in Rundle Mall in September, 2011.This was a time when I was still living in the CBD and so it easy for me to walk the city in Adelaide learning how we perceive the city, how we imagine it, how we experience it. The photos of shop windows below are very different to the drone's aerial view of Rundle Mall; an aerial view which has become pervasive in documentaries filmed outdoors.

I was being a flaneur wandering from shop window to shop window, drifting amongst the shoppers and office workers who were going about their business in a very determined and focused manner. I was just drifting through the shopping precinct looking for something to photograph; drifting not hunting. The photo is different from Google's Street view which unfolds on the screen under our fingers.

walking Bowden

I was able to walk around Bowden making some photos when I was in Adelaide last week. I had several hours whilst I was waiting for Kayla to be clipped. I quickly realised that the Bowden/Brompton that I lived in during the 1980s has well and truely gone.

This old industrial /working class suburb is undergoing extensive urban renewal and redevelopment. The factories and cottages have all gone--replaced by apartments in Bowden and townhouses in Brompton.

I spend some time walking around the new redevelopment in Bowden--it is high density urban infill with a heritage precinct on the land of the old Brompton Gasworks. Bowden is envisioned as a vibrant, inner city destination.

The empty land opposite where I used to live in Gibson Street is now Emu Park whilst the Stobie poles have mosaics. The boundary in Gibson St has gone, as has the house where I had a studio. Conroys Small Goods is still there.

Re-development of the Central Market precinct

The response to the decline of automotive and manufacturing activity and employment in Adelaide has been redevelopment to ensure a transition to an information and knowledge based economy. Adelaide, as a middle ranking city in Australia, is lagging behind Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Perth in becoming a knowledge city. Adelaide struggles to develop the human capital (knowledge workers) to underpin the knowledge economy and the infrastructure to utilise that human capital to create economic value. Melbourne is probably the key city here.

One sign of the process of change in Adelaide to becoming a post-industrial city can be seen in the number of boutique hotels being built in the city.This is considered to be part of the 'revitalisation' index.

The large background building under construction is the Indigo Hotel in Market Street looking across Gouger St. The Indigo brand is owned by IHG hotelier, which is set to open in 2020. It is marketed as adding to, and participating in the vibrant atmosphere of the Central Market precinct.

Adelaide Central Market precinct (walkable urbanism)

Up until 2014-15 Suzanne and I lived in Sturt St a couple of blocks from the Adelaide Central Market in Adelaide's CBD. The Central Market was our shopping centre and we would do the weekly shop early on a Saturday morning around 7am after we had walked with the poodles (seen as significant others). We would walk down to the market precinct with a shopping trolley, have a coffee at Cibo's in Gouger St, do the shopping, then walk back to the town house, unpack the shopping, then have breakfast. We would be back home around 8.30-9 am.

We walked to most places in the CBD (GP's, gym, hairdresser, gallery openings, etc ). This convenience was one of the attractions of inner city living. I understood walking to be a counter to the car's domination of the city with its traffic noise and fumes, congestion, the urban grime and the heat during the summer. Our car would sit in the garage during the week, as it was mostly used for travelling to places outside the inner city, or to go to Victor Harbor on the weekends. Now, at Victor Harbor, we have 2 cars and we have to travel in the car to several shops to do the weekly shopping.

street art

During the last few days I have been going through the archives looking for material for the forthcoming online Walking/Photography exhibition at Encounters Gallery. Whilst doing so I came across some photos of street art in Adelaide, South Australia that I had made around 2011 whilst I was walking the city.

I was living in the city at the time and my daily walks with the poodles would be around the CBD and the parklands. These walks would be meanderings--to do with exploration, a way of accommodating myself, of feeling at home. It was a way I got to know the city. Walking into dead ends, or reluctantly retracing my steps, didn't matter to me because this was part of the process of exploration.