Keswick Creek in Mile End South is a concrete drain not a living creek.

Was Covid-19 an interruption — a one-off pandemic —- to the emerging urban renaissance in Adelaide?

I spent 5 hours walking Adelaide’s CBD yesterday. I couldn’t help notice how dirty the city was, especially in those side streets and alleyways away from the main streets.

One notable characteristic of post-Covid Adelaide is the large number of empty shops, spaces and offices in the CBD.

0n my last walk in Adelaide in December 2022 I adopted a classic approach. I wandered the streets with a Leica M4 rangefinder and black and white film. Just like I used to do in the late twentieth century.

A capitol city that continues to remain half empty is surreal. Other surreal moments then appear; moments that refer back to the shop windows and shop fronts in Paris photographed by Eugène Agtet,

The Language of Light and Dark: Light and Place in Australian Photography by Melissa Miles explicitly addresses photography and the modern city

Photography's capacity to freeze and preserve time has been seen as one of its central characteristics. Yet Adelaide is constantly changing as it transitions from an industrial city to a post-industrial one. Can photography represent time in the form of change?

Though Judy Annear’s text The Photography and Australia is a photographic project that aims too provide the conceptual and historical aspects in terms of people, place, culture and history it oddly ignores the city as one of its themes.

The city centre or CBD is full of vacant shops, and there are a striking number of office buildings that still lie empty. The disruption and decay that has affected people’s immediate urban environment appears most visibly with the increasing homelessness in the form of people now living in their cars or sleeping rough in the street.

Early on a Sunday morning to photograph the history of the CBD though its architecture. It was early Sunday morning was chosen because I wanted empty streets — no people and no parked cars. It would be just the buildings and their relationships.

On an early morning walk in the CBD in late winter.

If “post-Covid” Adelaide has similar aspects to that the 1990s then a considerable amount of baggage from the past seems to gave been deeply and often subconsciously internalised” within the people

I have started to photograph in black and white was well as in colour, thereby reconnecting with my 1980’s Adelaide photography.

When I left Adelaide I realized that my time living in Sturt St was during and after the global financial crisis of 2007 -8.

We left living in Sturt St in tAdelaide’s CBD in early 2015 to live on the coast at Encounter Bay.

One of the interesting features of the city as you walk around are the urban reflections.

When we were living in Sturt St two blocks directly south of the Adelaide Central Market we shopped for our fruit and vegetables there, as well as for our groceries at the Coles supermarket.

I was glad when autumn came with its colours as I found the CBD drab and depressing.

When I was wandering the CBD around 2012-13 I noticed the absence of people compared to Sydney or Melbourne. There was a sense of emptiness.