mapping the space outside of Adelaide

I have been bunkered down in the digital studio in front of the computer scanning the 1980s archival  medium format negatives for The Bowden Archives and Other Marginalia book.  With most of the scanning for the first two sections now done, I  have  started to scanning negatives for the third section.  This one  is based around my escaping from the confines of Bowden after I’d purchased a VW Kombi.

Some of these are photos of Adelaide’s suburban beaches (Glenelg, Larg’s Bay  Semaphore and North Haven) during the heat of the summer,    others are  from day  trips through the Adelaide Hills and Mt Lofty Ranges; some are  from trips to Melbourne and there is one major road trip along the River Murray to  the eastern seaboard. I wasn’t really aware of many of these photos that I’d taken. The negatives were developed, contact sheets made,  filed away in a filing cabinet, then forgotten until now.

Mt Lofty Ranges

Though some of these photographs  are concerned with urbanism, they  are different from the Bowden section, which was very much concerned with the suburb being shaped by the  spatial production of industrial capitalism; a fragmentary map of the suburb at a particular point in Adelaide’s urban history. This was a  map of the past that disrupts  the cartographic schema of the offical mapping of this urban space.  The latter   maps were  a  representation of urban space produced by entities with financial or political power that  was designed  to serve the interests of industry.

The third section  has  yet to be conceptualised other than it working within the overall place and memory  framework. Some of the photos in the third section— for example those of the Adelaide Hills and Mt Lofty Ranges— are also a mapping of the space outside the boundaries of Adelaide. These are photos of single trees and a denuded landscape arising from agriculture.

Mt Lofty Ranges

I remember that the extent of the deforestation in the Mt Lofty Ranges shocked me. This landscape was  a damaged ecosystem.