I lived in the city square mile of Adelaide in a newly built townhouse. I would  wander around the local neighbourhood--the Central Market precinct--- with my camera. For the moment, as  a city dweller,  I was happy wandering around the central business district photographing the street art, exploring the urban space  and being a part of  the snapshot  photographic culture.   

The decline in manufacturing meant that a rustbelt, depressed Adelaide was rebranding itself  to make the place where we live into a “destination” for tourists. This post-card Adelaide  was designed as a response to counter the industrial decline and fiscal stress of the 1970s and 1980s caused by the economic flows of  a globalizing spectacularized capitalism.  The self-promotion  used a public relations campaign to tap into the rapidly growing  worldwide tourism market marked by fashion.  

Tourist Adelaide was a  place that was unique and extraordinary--just like every other city that was busy creating it's own visual brand.  It had clean streets, low crime rates, a  sense of well-being that is exuded by pleasant public places, as well as  the tourist attractions of regional wineries in a liquid modernity.  Photography help create  the visual culture around postcard Adelaide. 

I was content with my my haphazard urban walking journeys. I had no desire to  gain an MFA to seek employment in the academic-photography sector of the photographic-art establishment; to become a photojournalist representing the state of the world and the lives and situations of vulnerable others; or  to make money (earn a living) in the  photography industry;  or to  become part of Australian  postmodern avant garde that emerged ready made from virgin soil in the 1970s that had supposedly picked up the broken thread of earlier avant-gardist moments, in Paris in the 1920s.

By the 1990s Adelaide had  been  made into a  depressed marginal  city  by a globalizing  capitalism and its provincialism offered a way to exist on  the edge of  a modernist  art history's prejudices about photography with its Eurocentric emphasis on avant‐garde negativity  and aesthetics. The combination of  snapshot photography and  walking the city  offered a space to turn away from  the art institution's  discourse,  which  celebrated  singular achievements and avant‐garde photographic practice  within  a coherently linear narrative of  a canon of photographic artists and master works drawn almost exclusively from Europe and the United States. 

The ground floor plan of the art institution's  presented  modern art as a flow of art movements tending towards specific destiny. If the destiny was geometric and non geometric abstraction in 1936   what was the destiny in the last quarter of the 20th century, when it was capitalism providing the shock of  the new and historical trauma? Radicalization of gender and sexual difference?