The image below is a more documentary style interpretation of the Adelaide Brass Castings foundry, which was on the corner of Gibson St and Port Rd, opposite the Governor Hindmarsh Hotel or The Gov. The photo was made in the late afternoon and it shows just how much C20th Bowden was an industrial suburb.

I used to walk past this foundry in Gibson St quite often. I would peer inside and shudder —it looked as if I was peering into the C19th. It looked so primitive and grimy — no doubt it had been built before electric light substituted for daylight.  The old sawtooth foundry has been pulled down — just like all the other factories in the area– with Adelaide Brass Castings moving to a another building further along Gibson St.

The time was before the automation in photography that increasingly renders the agency of the photographer more or less obsolete in the sense the camera as an apparatus programmes the photographer who uses it. It was a time before before software made the photo into raw material to be edited on a computer in post-production and before the camera became a networked digital device and images became another form of data.

It was around the time when we started noticing that we were living in a constant flow of visual imagery, and an emerging awareness that some kind of threshold has been passed in our time between a written world and a visual one — we were entering into an image-centered world.

Language’s previous pacing and structuring and sedimentation of experience is being invaded, interfered with, overtaken by the different rhythms and transparencies of the shifting visual array.An  Image regime embedded in words, such as the brand name, the product slogan, the compressed pseudo-narrative of the TV commercial, the soundbite etc.