The graffiti in Bowden during the 1980s was often quite blunt and direct with no ambiguity in the message: I interpreted it as the signs of the increasing emphasis on law and order as a response to the local residents /industry politics, … Read More
The residential architecture in industrial Bowden prior to its recent gentrification consisted of cheaply built working class cottages. They were dark inside, full of salt damp during the winter and hothouses in the summer. This housing had no insulation and … Read More
These are a couple more Bowden portraits that supplement the ones currently in the Bowden portfolio on my website. I didn’t do many formal portraits. As I mentioned in the Preface I worked part time at Conroys Smallgoods in Bowden to buy … Read More
In his essay ‘Australian Made’ in Each Wild Idea: Writing , Photography, History (2000) Geoffrey Batchen contests the view that Australian photography after 1945 was a dependent shadow of trends in the United States. He says that this assumption underpins … Read More
The empty urban streets of the inner suburb of Bowden bear witness to the slow and steady disappearance of the blue collar, inner suburb working class through the process of de-industralization. The streets are the sites of this trauma and … Read More
I only made a few portraits of people in the city of Adelaide during the 1980s. One place was Valentino’s Restaurant in Gays Arcade, off Adelaide Arcade, near Twin Street. My sister used to work there as a waitress whilst she … Read More
Most of the images in the Adelaide section of The Bowden Archives and Other Marginalia come from city strolling with a camera in the company of Fichte, my cream coloured, standard poodle. City strolling is a translation of the French … Read More
The late 198os and early 1990s in Adelaide was a period after the 1980s property boom and during ‘the recession we had to have’. I was living alone and working long hours tutoring and cleaning (early morning and evening) in … Read More
The deregulatory financial reforms of the Hawke/Keating government from 1983 that saw the globalisation of the Australian economy helped to advance the speculative boom that occurred in the late 1980s. In Adelaide, insurance companies, superannuation funds and government financial institutions … Read More
As the social relationships between people were becoming increasingly mediated by images, and the symbols of consumption such as cars, neon signs, and shops became ever more seductive and signs of social status and personal identity, the process of deindustrialisation continued … Read More