Walking/photographing Adelaide

I briefly explored in and around  Gawler Place  in the  hour or so that I had between meetings in Adelaide's CBD  on Wednesday (18th May).  This  exploration  focused less  on the empty shops or offices themselves,  and more on the urban  space of the street that included the empty offices.

More specifically,  it was the interface  space between the inside of the building and the street outside the building along with its various reflections in the glass windows of the buildings. What could be called thresholds. 

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The recent brute force attacks and hacks to two of my Wordpress blogs --Thoughtfactory and Mallee Routes --- have caused  me  to start to  look at Square Space for re-building the Walking Adelaide project. Rebuilding because this project  has basically outgrown Posthaven's  simple  blog format.  It  needs galleries, blog and text and  so rather than building another Wordpress site I am considering Square Space. There is more on this at the Thoughtfactory blog.

The galleries, blog and text would be designed to give the project more depth. 

Post-Covid Adelaide is different to the one that I lived and photographed in  during the second decade of the 21st century. As noted in earlier posts  there are fewer people on the streets of the CBD. Whilst walking around the northern part of the CBD  last Tuesday (26th April)  I noticed that  the only section of the city that had lots of people moving around was the north-west end of the CBD,  and these were students at the Uni of SA

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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. 

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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.   

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.

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It could well  be the case that with the disappearance of the Holden  car plant at Elizabeth,  Adelaide is in danger of being  a distressed city with its unemployment, run-down buildings, an inequality with  its impoverishment  part of the population,  an underperforming public school system, declining living standards,  and a limited skill base due to young people leaving to find work in Sydney or Melbourne.  

Hindley Street is  the  historically grungy street in Adelaide's CBD with little in the way of modernist Adelaide architecture.  Historically,  it has been the  nightlife entertainment centre of a suburban and industrial Adelaide.  Today the street consists of  yiros outlets, shisha venues, convenience stores,  massage parlours and pubs.

It is in need  of a bit more diversity to overcome the tacky look of urban impoverishment. This is an example of the historical grunge:

Despite the  recent emergence of a  laneways and street culture in Adelaide, Hindley Street  still has an image problem from the perspective of the city council.  It is a counter image to the offical brand of the city.  

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This is one of the last images that I made with a large format view camera (a 5x7 monorail) before I left living in Sturt St in Adelaide's CBD  to move down to Encounter Bay on the coast on the coast of the southern Fleurieu  Peninsula. The  photo was made early on a  Sunday morning in the late autumn.   Hence the empty streets.  

It is of Wakefield House  in Wakefield Street just east of Victoria Square.  I do not think that it is heritage listed.  Wakefield House  is  a heavy, concrete modernist building that would have had a utopian feel to it when it was first built and celebrated.   This building represents the future.  It stood for  modern,  industrial  Adelaide. Today, my personal impressions is  that the building has a historical,  almost brutal look.  

There are  a number of such brutalist buildings in Adelaide from the 1960s/1970s. 

There is a long history of architectural photography and this one is a modest architectural photo in a documentary style,  rather than an atmospheric moment, or the specific look of the photographer.    It does not strive to be the glossy architectural photo that one sees in the architectural magazines.   It  makes no pretension to be an architectural hero shot, namely the photo that gives a project an identity through being the face of a building. The hero shot  is the image in commercial architectural photography  that is done for the client which  everyone goes ooh aah over. 

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I found the empty streets in the CBD disconcerting,  when I was walking around them in the early morning on the weekends.  This was the reality of an industrial society: a stumbling around amongst the nineteenth century architecture didn't result in  me  coming across a diversity of  random people.  I rarely  saw another person.   

There was a sense of melancholy on the streets.   A desire for an urban life that wasn't there.  I was living in an industrial  city that wasn't really a city because of the lack of people. They were all in the suburbs.  It was eerie. The promise was that people would come with the transition to the post-industrial  society.  

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 Many of my photos  of the street  from the perspective of carparks have little or no people in them. This is not  just by design.

 One of the notable historical aspects of Adelaide is the lack of people walking the streets or gathering  in squares or piazzas. It always felt like a large country town rather than a capital city

This is starting to change as more people are encouraged to start  living  in the CBD  and more international students arrive to study at the universities in the CBD. But  on Sunday morning the people on the streets are few and far between.  

One reason for this lack of people is the lack of piazzas or laneways that are closed to cars. It is proving very difficult to achieve this because it is political. The  political conservatives are opposed to the inner-city living,  and they favour the suburbs and the use of the car as  the  mode of transport.   

The conservatives  see those who want  the inner city to be a more attractive and liveable as Greenies who are  pro bike and anti-car. They favour more investment in freeways and less investment in public transport including light rail in the CBD.