Richard Glover | Paradise

Paradise

Richard Glover

Docklands & Southbank, Melbourne (cover) An ongoing urban renewal project west of the city centre and along the south bank of the Yarra River, to develop remnant docks and related heritage buildings and further extend the central business district and in particular increase high-rise residential apartments.

Hanson Concrete, Blackwattle Bay, Sydney (detail) One of the few remaining industrial practices in the inner-city. With the planned redevelopment of the bay (and particularly, the shift of adjacent Sydney Fish Markets to this site) its existence is short-lived.

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Australian city centres are in a state of rapid and immutable change. Where once the face of our built environments was the result of a pragmatic mixture of commercial, industrial, warehousing, shipping and low-income residential activity, the pressure on city authorities to compartmentalise and decentralise these functions has left subsequent development shaped by market forces driven by a consumer-aspired vision of the future.

These inner-city sites are identified three ways: Dormancy; Transition; Future. Whilst dormant they possess elements of tension and intimidation, tranquility and meditation. During transition they have a capricious aesthetic uniquely aligned with their transitionary state. The future is the reassignment that follows - a seemingly attractive but wholly prospective refit of future expectations.

This series aims to illustrate these concepts and investigate the permutable nature of Australian urban environments and societal aim of development and progress. As industries and infrastructure are replaced by intellectual and technological production our cities move resolutely from pragmatic functionality towards a vague concept called lifestyle.

Richard Glover

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Barangaroo, Sydney An urban renewal project on the western edge of the city centre providing public foreshore amenity, striking high-rise commercial towers and controversial casino.

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Central Park, Sydney An ambitious residential and commercial development designed by prominent international architects on the six hectare, former Carlton & United Beweries (orginally Tooth & Co’s Kent Brewery) site.

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Millers Point, Sydney The High Street Flats were a row of public housing terraces built in the early 1900’s. The NSW Government sold them to private developers in 2016.

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from the series NEW SUBURBS

Richard Glover: Paradise The urban environment has held a prominent role in photography since the early days of the medium, with one of Daguerre’s earliest photographs ‘Boulevard du Temple’ reportedly taken in late 1838, recording the streets of Paris from an apartment window.1 Here, the absence of people (bar the accidental presence of a blurred male figure having his shoes polished) was due to the long exposures needed to imprint light onto the metal plate of what was to become known as the daguerreotype. The later street photographs by Charles Marville and Eugène Atget are also notable for the evacuation of people from the image. This was done for aesthetic rather than technological issues, and in doing so they established a means of photographing the urban landscape that rather than including people, revealed the traces of their absence. Atget in particular, influenced the Surrealists who found his eerie photographic records to capture the psychological underbelly of the city, with Walter Benjamin likening them to photographs of a crime scene. In the latter part of the twentieth century, this distinct aesthetic legacy found new life in contemporary photography of the urban fabric, most specifically in the work of German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, Michael Schmidt or Thomas Struth, and in the New Topographic movement in America in the 1970s.

The Paradise series by Richard Glover continues this aesthetic legacy by exploring the urban fabric in photographic renderings of Australian cities. Similarly, while Glover’s photographs contain no people they capture elements of human endeavour; it is this tension

that renders these images strange. Australian city centres have seen massive development and urban renewal in the last few years, to the point that urban vistas are constantly being rewritten, devolving, evolving, in a seemingly maniacal drive toward the annihilation of the past.

Focusing largely on Sydney and Melbourne, the Paradise series captures these cities in flux, from the on-going development of Barangaroo, Central Park or Melbourne’s Docklands, to the current turmoil over the future of Miller’s Point. Like Atget, Glover is documenting not just a city in the midst of change but one in which large swathes of the old are disappearing. Atget’s project was stimulated by the massive modernisation of late nineteenth-century Paris where he photographed the streetscapes and architectural details often overlooked by passers-by.

In the 1970s Thomas Struth commenced a project of documenting German cities in the West and the East, and subsequently many cities around the world in what has become a mammoth and unfinished undertaking.

Struth’s particular interest in such places was in how they bore the marks of history and the unconscious psychology of the city.2 Likewise, Glover’s rendering of the city in these panoramic views seem to tap into the unconscious of the city as a site of conflict between the past, the present and the future. It is in the interstices of these spaces that residents struggle with monumental changes inflicted by external forces that are largely political or market driven.

These once diversely inhabited spaces in which citizens worked and lived now face a new homogeneity that pushes the fringe-dwellers into suburbia. They reveal the traces of former industrial sites, docklands or worker’s houses with poignancy and a tension that is also

reflected in the contrast between the urban landscape and the strong verticality present in the trees and structures. In Western Distributor, Ultimo, Sydney, the elevated roadway winds like a scar across the suburb and is shown here from an oft-overlooked viewpoint from underneath the pervasive concrete structure. Poking out from under the weight of progress, a row of saplings is anchored to the site determined in their collective struggle for air and light.

On the former Carlton & United Breweries site in Sydney’s fringe district of Chippendale, luxury apartments and commercial buildings are dotted across the site, their shiny presence punctuated by the remaining traces of the brewery, now deemed as heritage structures. This view across the plot of land, now impeded by further new structures, reveals the struggle between the old and new with the remains of the art deco Australian Hotel on the left. The heritage-listed building was the pub of choice for the local brewery workers and later both university students and art-workers alike, who often visited for a quick pint or wine before an opening at one of the local art galleries. The plans for the building are mooted to be the development for a major hotel led by food guru Matt Moran and publican Bruce Solomon.3 Here, Glover captures the scene in the midst of transition, the billboard advertising’s promise of property bliss is countered by the torn signage, the graffiti and the old, cracked surface of the remaining early twentieth-century structure.

In many other city fringe areas the push for apartment dwellings has seen the demolition of early to mid-twentieth-century industrial precincts including those throughout Alexandria, Erskineville and Waterloo. The infamous saw-tooth roofed factories that lined the streets

with their simple, low facades that punctuated the sky with a modernist rhythm are now disappearing. Whereas a few years ago such warehouses and small factories may have been converted to arts precincts or groovy homes, they are now replaced by monstrous developments with anonymous, bland facades. In Glover’s photograph of a factory building in Waterloo, the geometry of the structure is repeated by the erection of temporary fencing, with the hint of a menacing crane hovering in the distance. The photograph’s minimal tonal range enhances the melancholic hue of this vista, and as in many of the images in this series, the framing of the scene adds a claustrophobic weight.

The oppressive tone in these images butts up against a pragmatic optimism for a future in which nature and culture intertwine, as can be seen in the underbelly of the Western Distributor, or the view of the UTS structures.

While the history of many of these places is being erased and rewritten, these photographs stand as a record of these sites in a moment of transition, with their “capricious aesthetic uniquely aligned with their transitional state,” as Glover puts it. One can see Paradise then as a trace of the present becoming the past; and as picturing the tension between personal stories of people who lived and worked in these areas with those whose aspirational dreams will see new stories unfold.

Donna West Brett, University of Sydney, October 2017 1. Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) invented the daguerreotype process of photography, which was patented and given to the people by the French Government in 1839.

2. Struth’s series is titled Unbewusste Orte/Unconscious Places, 1977 3. Scott Bolles, Matt Moran buys The Australian Hotel, Good Food, 10 May 2016, https://www.goodfood. com.au/eat-out/news/matt-moran-buys-the-australian-hotel-20160509-gonrtj

Western Distributor, Sydney A controversial roadway linking the Harbour Bridge with the inner-west since inception during the 197080s. The freeway has become a structure of such dominance that subsequent developments have been forced around or between it’s aerial lengths.

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Docklands, Melbourne An ongoing urban renewal project west of the city centre making use of remnant docks and related heritage buildings and further extend the central business district and increase the residential population.

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University of Technology, Sydney A new, larger campus building will replace this being demolished. This transitional moment depicts a smorgasbord of elevational planes, discordant shapes, textures and tones.

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Industrial precinct, Waterloo, Sydney The classic saw-tooth roofline of industrial and warehouse buildings were commonplace in inner-city suburbs. They now are being usurped by high-rise residential development. Shortly after being photographed this particular example was demolished to make space for another apartment building.

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North Wharf peninsula, Docklands, Melbourne West of the city centre is this finger of land in the Yarra River earmarked for development. Until such time it remains a defacto carpark, fishing spot and film location.

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Paradise With special thanks to Lisa Jones, Donna West Brett, Peter Burgess and Paul McDonald at Contact Sheet Photographs © Richard Glover 2017 Essay © Donna West Brett 2017 All Rights Reserved www.richardglover.com/projects

9-23 Mackenzie Street, Melbourne A carpark for over a decade, development began in 2017 on this site for a 37-storey residential tower which will establish this precinct as Australia’s most densely populated area.

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