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 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.