This was the period of deindustrialization, the State Bank collapse of the early 1990s and South Australia being the rustbelt state. Public austerity and privatisation was seen as the only considered response to the state financial crisis with its high unemployment and exodus of people leaving the state. The only considered response in the sense that it was held that there was no alternative.

This was the period of the emergence of neo-liberalism with its market-driven mechanisms, rolling back the state, globalization and Fukuyama’s conception of the ‘end of history’ after the cold war had waned. It was prior to the third way that was embraced by the Rann Labor Government in the early in the first decade of the 21st century.

This pre-postmodernist photography was looking back on what had been when manufacturing had been a priority for both the South Australian state government and the federal government. Manufacturing had been South Australia’s traditional industrial base, but there was no future for the scale of manufacturing production that had shaped South Australia’s industrialisation historically. It was replaced by a turn to silver bullets — ie., hopes of a mining boom at Olympic Dam and large-scale defence industry contracts.

The photography was looking back on a history of protected industrialisation that was disappearing and being forgotten; looking back from within the emergence of a watershed or transitional moment of a crumbling industrial modernity. The shapes of this historical moment in the 1990s were a series of flows moving through it. These flows opened up different modes of thinking, different ways of seeing and an expanding field of art with its shift in artistic practice away from being based in mediums towards intermediality and installations.

This was an opening underpinned by the forces of globalization that that was broader than the then prevalent postmodern art discourse as artists in the contemporary art to come were working in a global visual culture. This opening provided a clearing that allowed for an old-fashioned realist photography with a historical awareness to work in a space outside both modernist and postmodernist art.