Telling Our Story, Adelaide Festival Centre, 16 April - 6 June 2018
For this series of images I was given free reign to photograph whatever I wanted to photograph on and around the Adelaide Festival Centre during it's redevelopment, it was never going to be a formal documentation of every stage. After undergoing the required training to allow me onto active demolition and construction sites, I was relatively free to explore and make images that helped tell the story from inside the fences. Whether it was up on the roof where they were re-skinning all surfaces or in the voids beneath the recently dissected Amphitheatre, it was my point of view, how I saw it. My concerns were with shadows, form, scale and telling the story. The raw stripped back surfaces, the ripped edges of concrete and steel, the excavations, the massive machinery that either smashed or cajoled, all transforming the landscape into new realities.
The images were taken with an old Hasselblad Supreme Wide Angle (SWA) , the rolls of 120 film were then developed in my laundry and hung in the shower to dry. The camera is fully manual; it has no batteries, no light meter, no auto settings, no power wind and you can’t preview the image through the lens. On top of that I had to take the photos while wearing work gloves, helmet and safety glasses. The camera is hand held, no tripods to get in the way. The black edge on each image is the frame of the film. This is just a small sampling of what was recorded.
Click on an image to enlarge
©Tony Kearney 2020.
For this series of images I was given free reign to photograph whatever I wanted to photograph on and around the Adelaide Festival Centre during it's redevelopment, it was never going to be a formal documentation of every stage. After undergoing the required training to allow me onto active demolition and construction sites, I was relatively free to explore and make images that helped tell the story from inside the fences. Whether it was up on the roof where they were re-skinning all surfaces or in the voids beneath the recently dissected Amphitheatre, it was my point of view, how I saw it. My concerns were with shadows, form, scale and telling the story. The raw stripped back surfaces, the ripped edges of concrete and steel, the excavations, the massive machinery that either smashed or cajoled, all transforming the landscape into new realities.
The images were taken with an old Hasselblad Supreme Wide Angle (SWA) , the rolls of 120 film were then developed in my laundry and hung in the shower to dry. The camera is fully manual; it has no batteries, no light meter, no auto settings, no power wind and you can’t preview the image through the lens. On top of that I had to take the photos while wearing work gloves, helmet and safety glasses. The camera is hand held, no tripods to get in the way. The black edge on each image is the frame of the film. This is just a small sampling of what was recorded.
Click on an image to enlarge
©Tony Kearney 2020.
