This architectural photography explores the urban spaces, urban representations and the photographic form at a time when the humanities, art schools are suffering from reduced public funding and the photographic industry is in decline and going through hard times. Covid-19 has made things worse for the industry in Australia. Photographers are currently doing it tough.

Cities attract yet disturb. They have light and dark spaces — visual and metaphorical. What the visual still representations miss are the chaotic energy and maelstrom of the urbanscape caused by the sounds and smells of the petrol cars roaring underneath the overpass — the underside of the modernist city. This experience of the soundscape of modernity points to the dark representations of the city ie., the images of urban dystopia, which emerged as a specific literary and cinematic construct in modernity. The machinic big city of Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis is an early example. It is the Urtext for noir visions of the modernist city.

Like cinema photography is part of the experience of urban modernity: the city has undeniably been shaped by the cinematic/photographic form, just as cinema and photography owe much of their nature to the historical development of the modern industrial city. The forms and representation of these photographies helped to shape the city in people’s perceptions and understandings and they charged urban discourse in a fashion that eclipsed traditional literary and artistic expressions. Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer in Weimar Germany come to mind. The emphasis is on the ephemeral and drift in the experience of urban modernity.

The solitary figure on the bridge evokes the experience of the figure of a stranger in the modern city. The city’s densely populated environments fragmented the community of pre-modern industrial society, and began to impart a sense of anonymity onto its inhabitants. The figure of the stranger is classically associated with the theme of urban estrangement.

It was in this anonymous milieu, where the virtual presence of photography and cinema found its place and classically interpreted the cityscape as a world experienced by  the stranger, and the experience of a world  populated   by strangers.