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.     

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.