The CitiCentre picture below is one of my early large format elevated photos of Adelaide's CBD. It is rough and I have never shown it publicly. It was made at a time when I was living Sturt St in the CBD, and I'd just started to explore making urban large format photographs of Adelaide. At the time I didn't know of any working Australian large format photographers who was making urban images of the CBD of the capital cities. Though I knew of the early black and white photos that Grant Mudford made in the 1970s I didn't realise at the time that they were made with 35mm film and not with his Sinar 5x4.
I distinctly remember the process of making the CitiCentre photo: it was in the late afternoon that I carried the 5x7 gear to a tram stop, caught the tram to Rundle Mall, walked through the crowds of shoppers in Rundle Mall, then going up the lift to access the top floor of the ugly car park on the corner Rundle and Pulteney Sts. The location had been scoped beforehand -- it has to be prior to making a decision to make a picture.
The location was the U carpark that replaced the Foy and Gibson building that was demolished in the 1970s. The car park had iron bars or railings that allowed you to put the lens of a handheld camera through. Most of the new car parks in Adelaide's CBD are now covered in mesh and it is impossible to photograph through the mesh. However, I wasn't really sure that I would be able to get the camera lens of the 5x7 Cambo momorail through the iron bars/railings of the car park in order to make the photo. To my relief I could.
This was a decade ago and I had just started thinking about a project of photographing Adelaide -- a project that would m eventually evolve into Walking Adelaide several years latter. At the time I was just making photos and still thinking in terms of the purity of the image the modernist idea of uniqueness and medium specificity and the white cube. A photograph of a building in the city is a photograph. It's not the building anymore.
The process dominated at that early stage.I just counted myself lucky if I could get the 5x7 monorail camera to a chosen location and made a photo. I did know that what I was trying to do was not architectural photography of the latter Grant Mudford.
