Launceston is one of my favourite towns in Tasmania. We were staying with family at Evandale  for a couple of days and so it was easy to pop into Launceston for the day. There were pieces  of street art in the more industrial area that caught my eye.  

 I was still trying to find my feet as a photographer. I had no projects to work on. I was still taking snapshot photos as I moved through the world.  This style of snapshot often is predictable, conservative and repetitive. The  sense of banality and cliches of visual culture was reinforced by the  feeling  that I was in an in-between place. It was a state of flux between paid work and being a photographer.  An independent photographer. 

I sensed that Australia was in a state of flux. It was changing under a neo-liberal mode of governance in which the less governments do the better. Government needs to be as small as possible and that the more aspects of our lives that are run on market principles the better off we’d be. It is a world where the rich need more money as an incentive and the poor need less money as an incentive.

Australia was experiencing  a one off mining boom,  and the Howard  Government was spending most of the windfall on tax cuts and middle-class welfare. Yet  you could sense that Australia  was shifting to  becoming  a harsher, less caring world, where daily life was more cut-throat, where the gap between rich and poor widened more rapidly and where the proportion of households falling below the poverty line increases every year. 

The neo-liberal  mode of governance  advocates greater competition between public and private schools, public and private hospitals, private health funds, universities and private education providers (as well as among big and small universities) and between rich states and poor states (such as South Australia and Tasmania).

I noticed how the  advertising photography's  strategic imagery (eg., Terry Richardson or Juergen Teller) that  is designed to  persuade and  promote a product used the visual style of the snapshot aesthetic  to sell a vision of a brand’s essential role in a good life.  The staged spontaneity  was especially noticeable in fashion ads where the  apparent authenticity of the images appear not  to have constructed the aura of personal intimacy and authenticity.   This realist aspect of snapshot aesthetics underlines the fashion element of many products as up-to-date, hip, and cool and  it trades on the  snapshot's traditional  association with fun, leisure, and smiling happy people.