My most recent extensive wandering around Adelaide’s CBD was in late 2024. The wandering was designed as a scope walk to uncover some suitable locations for my large format photography. . Unfortunately, though I came across some — mostly architectural ones —- I haven’t been able to do the photography as life has got in the way.

I came across a couple of suitable locations in the CBD of the contemporary city and Riverbank was one of them. This signified a post-industrial Adelaide. Despite its postmodern architectural appearance, the extensive use of the concrete infrastructure referred back to, and reminded me of, the modern city’s concrete modernist buildings of the 1960s. If some of the latter are now in various states of decay and are undergoing renovation, they did provide the CBD with a strong visual character that was in contrast to the suburban sprawl at the periphery.

Despite the political attempts to make Adelaide a symbol of a confident and progressive urban modernity, it never was more than a large provincial city eclipsed by Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Adelaide was devastated by the de-industrialization of the 1970s-80s and it was a krisis — a turning point. It has taken the city 2-3 decades to recover and find its feet as a post-industrial city. It was looking good in the 2nd decade of the 21st century —new buildings, greater numbers of people living in the city, small bars, street life —- then Covid arrived, the city ground to a halt, and then slowly recovered.

Another location I came across is the above, but it may not be possible to photography this with a large format camera. The scene attracted me for the relationship between the old and new architecture, and also for the presence of the street trees in the city; trees whose habitat, growth, reproduction, and death are controlled by humans. I had been looking at Hiro Nishikawa’s large format urban work of plants in Tokyo — not that I ever wanted to go down the pathway of making platinum prints.

The large format photography is a fragmentary, embodied, subjective perspective and unlike what the experimental cinema of the 1920s and 1930s aimed to do, it is not a portrait of the contemporary city as a whole. These city pictures — like the other hand held photography — are a series of fragments with little connection to the artworks of the 1970s —the moment of performance art and staged occupations of spaces, that were at the same time theatrical and ephemeral;—- a time when Adelaide as a mode of urban life offered potential and promise.

city pictures

unfamiliar territory