Melbourne, Stephen Hennessy, City Seams, Swanston Street
Summary
Image from the series 'City Seams', taken on Swanston Street between Lonsdale Street and Little Lonsdale Street.
Artist Statement
Completed over one weekend in March 1995, the ‘City Seams’ sequence of photographs takes the ‘join’ or ‘seam’ between each business on Swanston Walk, Melbourne, as a critical marker of difference – the abutment of each building or business becomes a sign of contested realities in the big city.
Retail styles fight for traction along this promenade. Banks, two-dollar shops, fast food outlets, fashion and jewellery stores sit side by side in a continuous ribbon. Hovering shoppers punctuate the space, whereas striding walkers seem to accelerate the progression of images.
The regular layout of bluestone pavers and planter boxes along Swanton Walk was used as a measure for my tripod, which was placed at precisely the same pavement point for each shot. The calculated regularity of this process, designed to centralise the vertical joint between buildings of each frame, is in effect mocked by the excess of detail produced by each shot.
Swanston Walk is revealed as a series of reflecting and refracting surfaces – a staccato rhythm of text, half text, paint, stone, paper, adjacent doors, half doors, closed doors, faux entrances, blind windows and frames.
When the ‘City Seams’ 1995 series was first exhibited in 100mm x 150mm format, the 188 images required 28 linear metres of gallery space. Displayed like this, the join between the photographs becomes a second artificial seam and an alternating rhythm offsetting the central seam of each picture. Swanston Street maintains it retail frontality but is now a vigorous frieze of divisions, an erratic relief of signage, shop doors and windows crowded with detail and the visual noise of commerce. The city is collapsed and magnified. The shops and restaurants are like a long supply ship, and the historical significance of one line in the Hoddle grid is amplified in this image map.
In March 2015 (20 years after the original investigation), I re-photographed Swanston Walk in the same way, not as a repetition exercise but more a celebration of development, a chance to recheck the continual jostling of infrastructure, design and movement that flows in chance juxtapositions on Swanston Walk.
The process of urban renewal and redesign expanded the number of seams or joins in the ‘City Seams’ 2015 series to 229 images. More sophisticated shopfronts and greater foot traffic increased the complexity, density and vibrancy of the images. It was fascinating to compare and contrast the site conditions of then and now, not as an exercise of loss but, just like the 1995 series, as a way to celebrate the physical immediacy and details of competition that jostle side by side in city space.
Stephen Hennessy
