I have been going through the remnants of the archive on an old Windows based PC that I had used in the 1990s. Its hard disc had collapsed — the blue screen of death — and then the back up … Read More
Thanks to the generous help of my friends, Judith Crispin, Stuart Murdoch, Paul Atkins at Atkins Photo Lab and Adam Dutkiewicz at Moon Arrow Press I now have a first draft of the Bowden Archives: Memory, Text, Place. The pictures have … Read More
I had a rudimentary studio setup whilst I was living and photographing in Bowden in the 1980s. There was a a table, a dark cloth as a background, available window light, a 5×7 Cambo monorail, the odd prop, and a solid … Read More
After talking to a prospective publisher, the title of the manuscript has been changed from Bowden Archives and other Marginalia to The Bowden Archives. This cut down means that the book will be about Bowden as the non-Bowden images–eg., the … Read More
I photographed a lot of the commercial architecture around Bowden-Brompton. The photography was before the rejuvenation of the area started to reverse the continual decline in the population from 1947 to the 1980s, due to the intrusion of new industries … Read More
The suburbs west of the city of Adelaide and the parklands, such as Hindmarsh and Bowden, were earmarked as industrial areas prior to 1945 because they were in the vicinity of the road and rail links between Adelaide’s CBD … Read More
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