photography + the modernist city

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 photos in the Adelaide  photo book are all post 2000 and they include a mix of film and digital as I started using a digital camera early in  2007. It's early days as I  haven't gone through the 2007-2012  archives,  the book has no name,  and I haven't decided how it will be published.   I have started writing an introduction based on reworking some text  left over from the Bowden book.

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.

 Film -- ie., photography and cinema --- were more than being  new mediums.   They are central to how modernity was experienced and understood  by a broad public. Photography and cinema  enabled the  relationship between modernity's shocks, surprises, distractions and overwhelming stimuli and its corollary, drift, the experience of vacancy, the sensation of empty moments, to be understood and negotiated. They helped to  shape modernity's urban visual culture.

Adelaide modern

Prior to mid twenthieth century  modernism Adelaide was a planned city of red brick and sandstone within a self-contained rectilinear grid   encircled by parks and green space, never to be built upon,  with its discrete zoning of dwelling, work, transportation and recreation.   It was  Colin Hassell and John Morphett  who  rejected the established classical/gothic revival architectural order in early 20th century Adelaide. 

The modernist ethos was to make a modern world, to sweep away the old and, out of chaos, build stability. Concrete was the  stuff of dreams of a progressive, dynamic cosmopolitanism.  Adelaide did not experience the modernist  Brutalist style of building  deployed to satisfy the urgent demand for cost-effective post-war housing on a mass scale that was  frequently associated with socialist utopian ideals, and dreams of collective living. 

One of the themes that I explored off and on when I was living in Adelaide's CBD was the modernist architecture from the 1960s and 1970s. These pictures are of the backs of those  overlooked "form follows function" buildings along  Pirie St which  survived the mindless razing of so much of Adelaide's built heritage from the 1960s to 1980s: 

 Many of the modernist  buildings that are gathered together in the Victoria Square precinct are of the 1970s butalist  genre, such as the Department for Education's headquarters on Flinders Street and  Wakefield House opposite St Francis Xavier's Cathedral. Whilst photographing these kind of buildings I realised the  importance of light to architecture and how it can transform a building completely, both inside and out. This is especially the case with the roughly textured béton brut  buildings.

West Terrace Cemetery

When we  lived in Adelaide's CBD in the first decade and half of the 21st century one of my  favourite afternoon poodlewalks was  in Adelaide's  west parklands, especially  Park 23 (G.S. Kingston Park or  Wirrarninthi) with its sculpture trail  plus  the heritage listed West Terrace Cemetery. Wirraninthi used to be called Wirranendi,  and over the years that I was living in the CBD I witnessed its  extensive replanting with trees, shrubs, grasses and the ecological  rehabilitation  of the  stormwater wetlands. 

We--the two poodles and me--  would spend many an hour wandering around and exploring the cemetery in the late afternoon.  It was safe territory.   The poodles could explore the  fenced grounds whilst  I could take photos. I just had to keep an eye out  for the cyclists riding through the grounds and for  the occasional graveyard  visitor. I usually went to the  forgotten, rundown  areas, which I found more to be more interesting than the newer, and more  flashy Italian/Greek  grave stones.  I thought that the latter were excessive--over way the top.