Project’s end?

Eight years after I began making the same picture on each day I was at work. Always at 8:30. Always from the same position. The project has now ended.

The changes in the scene that were most notable, were the weather. Others included the tree.

Often the picture made at 8:30 in no way reflected the weather for that day either before or after 8:30. Which isn’t reflected in the imagery itself.

The linchpin, that helped me decide to end it was the removal the tree. The tree had suffered some damage in the storms we had 10 days or so prior, and in the interim someone decided it needed to be removed entirely.

Here’s the first picture made in February 2014.

And the last made in December 2021.

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Wordless Wednesday, the iPhone 12 Pro Edition

photograph of clouds, test shot using iPhone 12 Pro


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Processed using Luminar 4.. If you use this link to purchase Luminar 4, I get some benefits.

Vernacular Housing?

 Vernacular Housing in Sunshine
Typical Vernacular Housing in Sunshine

A week or so ago, I made some pictures of the houses in Wright Street Sunshine that may disappear in the next few years. With one empty block and 2 for sale signs in a strip of a dozen or so house this makes for some big changes afoot. What I neglected to mention or perhaps didn’t recognise was that most of these buildings follow a similar style and appearance. I’m guessing that at some point a government agency was involved with these house’s construction.

Map of the inner west showing the site of the former RAAF base.
Former RAAF base in Tottenham marked in red, in relation to my house on the extreme left.

Thirty years ago there was an active RAAF base on a site that is now light industry and shopping centre a couple of Kilometres down the road. The site was sold to private developers in 1983(1)

There are some existing buildings of a similar style near the old site and they share similar characteristics to the ones I photographed in Wright Street. The common denominators that connect them are the materials. Fibre Cement is common. Small footprint and tiled roofs others.

The current formula that seems to be being applied to these old buildings, is the old houses are demolished. Then if the site permits several small units are built in their place. While these new units are dotted around the suburb, the danger of a homogeneous streetscape looms large.

Given that Wright Street is an arterial road then I doubt there may be that much new development going up. Keeping an eye on planning permits and council notifications will enable me to track these changes. Thereby producing a meaningful record of the suburb as it changes.

Footnotes

(1) Moca, P. 2015, Forty years ago May 28, 1975 Sunshine’s town clerk, Mr Bill Deutschmann,…[Derived Headline], Airport West, Vic.

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Sunset over Melbourne

sunset over melbourne from east hawthorn
Sunset over Melbourne from East Hawthorn Circa January 1998

What impact does a visual trope like a sunset have in this day and age of the networked image. Especially if it was made before flickr, facebook and probably google? This sunset was made circa 2002. It was made from the edge of the site where I worked from 1994 to 2013.

I’m thinking of posting sunsets fairly frequently as a kind of response to the current pandemic sweeping the world.

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