Bowden 1980-90

In the 1980s I had a photographic studio in Bowden, an old inner city, industrial working class suburb in western Adelaide in South Australia adjacent to the Adelaide Parklands. I taught myself to use large format cameras and to represent a suburb starting to undergo change. I worked part time at Conroys Smallgoods factory in Bowden, and studied for a BA in philosophy and visual arts at Flinders University.

The aim of the project was to represent a historic Bowden before the history of this working class suburb disappeared through the process of urban renewal and gentrification. This renewal was beginning to happen whilst I was living there. These are some of the images from  the archive,  which I currently going through to  select images for a book.

Other images  from this project can be seen on The Bowden Archives and Other Marginalia  weblog, which is the way a draft of the book is being constructed.

9 Comments

  • Reply Abstraction x 5 book launch - Thought FactoryThought Factory August 17, 2016 at 9:42 am

    […] operated  during the mid to the late 1980s. During the 1980s I was living in, working on,  the Bowden as well as the  Port Adelaide […]

  • Reply Shell Depot, Mantung – Oddly Squared October 6, 2016 at 10:17 pm

    […] I have only scanned some of the archives –the large format and the Bowden series. […]

  • Reply old Bowden, Adelaide | Oddly Squared November 2, 2016 at 11:29 am

    […] This  image was made whilst I was working on the 1980s  Bowden series. […]

  • Reply 78 Gibson Street | Oddly Squared November 4, 2016 at 4:15 pm

    […]  picture of  the two children at 78 Gibson St  is from the Bowden series. The genre would be seen as street photography today, as it resulted from  an unmediated chance […]

  • Reply office girls, Bowden | Oddly Squared November 12, 2016 at 9:27 am

    […]  Australian photographic context for the  street work in the  Bowden project  is probably the  Candid Camera: Australian Photography 1950s-1970s exhibition at the Art […]

  • Reply Bowden textures | Oddly Squared December 9, 2016 at 9:12 am

    […] the 1980s when  I was working on the Bowden project  The Developed Image, the South Australian Photographic Workshop    and the South Australian […]

  • Reply Bowden portraits | The Bowden Archives and Other Marginalia January 6, 2017 at 1:10 pm

    […] Some Bowden portraits to supplement  the ones on the website’s Bowden portfolio. […]

  • Reply Photobook Publishing? – Stuart Murdoch July 20, 2017 at 7:57 am

    […] fortunate to be have been involved in some of the early steps of the process. Gary’s book, The Bowden Archives is going to be a very interesting book, as both an archive of a place and as an expression of an […]

  • Reply Melbourne snapshots – The Bowden Archives and Other Marginalia February 23, 2020 at 10:18 am

    […] As mentioned in an earlier post of this blog the first section of The Bowden Archives and Other Marginalia consists of street photography or snapshots that were made made in Melbourne and Adelaide with 35mm cameras and black and white film. This section has been reframed as part of a snapshot culture or snapshot aesthetic and it leads into the second Bowden section. […]

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