photo-wooze

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. 

I was looking for a low key emphasis on colour in the walking Adelaide project, though not in the formalist sense. These skyline snapshots   are  designed to say something about the city's history --- content  or  meaning ---  as opposed to concentrating  on technique -- eg., a concern with correct exposure, being in focus, the right way to light  a building, or the right kind of light.

The core question becomes: why am I doing this instead of something else?  

Well, this moment of history in Adelaide was a time of optimism and hope that  the future would be different from the past. Things were going to get better. There was  a cultural revival happening.  The architecture of the buildings signified the march of progress in modernity -- things will be better for us than they had been.  A  new world based on utopian rationality was emerging from the  fabric of the nineteenth century. 


These hopes were dashed  when things fell apart in the early 1990s. They went pear shaped  with the financial collapse  of the  State Bank of SA during  Australia's transition into the global economy and culture. The 1980s boom  metamorphosed into  the  economic bust  in the early 1990s.  The 1990s were  the bleak,  wasteland years in Adelaide.  Despite the promise associated with the emergence of dial-up access to the world wide web  it was a haunted city of the nightmares of collapsed businesses and  broken lives.   

This was a difficult time for me.  I was in the process of giving up photography; the very high interest rates to crush inflation meant that I was struggling to pay the mortgage on the cottage in the south-east corner of the city through multiple part time jobs;  I was desperate  to finish the PhD in philosophy, knowing that there was no future  for me in academia.  In the early-mid 1990s I was just hanging on. 

The history and cultural value  the modernist architecture that  these buildings embody  is one of being both complex repositories of time  and embodying  a promise and a dream that once was.