I mentioned yesterday that I was planning a new photography project... and yesterday afternoon I jumped in the car to go and start it.
However the idea for the project didn't just appear out of midair... I was inspired by Mark B's blog, The Adelaide 'Alleyways and Side Streets' Project. Mark made it his mission to photograph, in some form or another, every single sidestreet and alleyway within the city's square mile. I think I'd actually found his blog months and months ago, took a quick look and thought "yeah, that's interesting, must come back and take a look"... but never did. Then I found it again sometime last week and bookmarked it, before getting around to going through all 483 posts on Sunday afternoon.
And I absolutely LOVED it! Not only does Mark have a brilliant eye (and seems to share my fetish for objects framed against clear blue sky), but he also opened my eyes to all these little nooks and crannies in the city that I had no real idea about. Yes, some of the places I knew quite well, but others were a complete surprise... like the wall covered in fifty thousand toy cars! That's SO on my list of places to seek out.
I don't know whether it's seeing them all together as a group and part of a project, but even the most mundane objects start to look interesting when you're seeing them like this.
So I flicked through my street directory and worked out where a few of the more interesting looking streets were, and decided that probably a good place to start would be the southwest corner of the city... I was much more likely to actually get a park, and a couple of the more interesting bits seemed to be down that way.I managed to get a park on South Terrace (for free no less, which I didn't think happened in the city!) and just picked a sidestreet at random and started wandering.
I do have a newfound respect for what Mark did though... not only did he walk every single street (and he would have had to backtrack quite a bit too, since places don't always lead to anywhere, or lead back on themselves or whatever), but he would have had to keep a record of where each of those streets was, and whether or not he'd gone down it before, and sort out which photos went with what street (I'm guessing maybe by photographing street signs when he could find them, but I'm not sure about that). And although it sounds lovely, just wandering aimlessly around the city streets... there can't have been anything aimless about it... I can only imagine that he must have had it planned out like some sort of weird, yet highly organised military campaign...
So I'm not surprised it took him over two years to finish!
Me, I just wandered about aimlessly for almost two hours... and I know that I probably missed at least half of the alleys and sidestreets on the map up there.
You honestly don't think about the number of backstreets that there are in a city... and the way that they all interlink or appear out of nowhere... especially when you're in a more residential area like that part of the city... and even more when it's one that hasn't been altered that much over time... so you still have the tiny little alleyways between the backs of houses that deliverymen (or more likely, the dunnyman) would have used. You just don't get those in the vast majority of suburbia. Or at least, those parts of suburbia that are either fairly new or heavily altered.
The other thing that threw me is that I kind of recognised a few places while I was out there... or at least felt like I did... from Mark's photos. And I took at least one shot that was a direct homage to one of the shots that he'd taken... whether or not it turns out that it was in the exact same spot or not, I don't know (and I can't for the life of me find the shot right now)... I do know that I took at least two shots of the exact same thing as him, just from a different angle.
It also looks as though the street art that I photographed back in January actually wasn't there in 2005, since his shot of that particular street contains a line of ants that wasn't there when I took my shots (although a couple of the ants do show up... almost as though they've been painted around, rather than being put there with the rest of the art).
I also bundled up my courage and walked down a street that somebody I used to know lives on. I have no idea whether he still lives there or not (although I'm guessing probably yes)... but since we stopped being friends I've not only avoided that street in particular, but, to be honest, that entire corner of town more or less. Oddly enough I may have actually gone right past him without knowing it. There were a couple of guys next to a car, talking to somebody in the car, and while neither of them was him (too young, too cute and too brunette), he may have been in the car (since it was more or less right outside his place, I think). I do know that the two guys outside the car pretty much stared at me as I was walking towards them (they probably stared at me after I walked past them too, but I couldn't see them, so who knows).
So, yeah... I wandered around until my camera battery went flat (which I knew it was going to, since it's been giving me the "low battery" symbol for a week or so now), then piled in the car and came home again.
I don't know if this is going to be an ongoing project, although I do know it's not going to be on the same scale as Mark's effort... but I think I'm going to have to do some more poking around in the backstreets of Adelaide.
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