Wednesday, January 17, 2007

The Back Streets & Lanes of Newtown

I took myself off on a short photo ramble on Sunday morning, never more than about 4 blocks from my house in any direction.

Sand & Sea
Sand & Sea

Sea & Sky
Sea & Sky

Keeping on top of the graffiti means repainting often, and I liked the way some of the walls become patchworks of different toned paint. Like urban abstracts.

Five
Five

The back lanes of Newtown are sometimes fascinating places. Abandoned furniture, hidden murals, little expressions of individuality that people might not want to show to the street.

The Conversation
The Conversation

Recline / Decline
Recline / Decline

Most of the houses in the neighbourhood are being modernised and renovated to retain their charm, but every so often you can find ones that escaped the urban renewal.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I feel obliged to point to my partner ’Pong’s continuing photographic fascination with the village’s back lanes — including his sequence Roaming Cavendish Lane (available as a movie) and his recent Passive Intruder exhibition — though the latter seems to be faulty in some web browsers?

And of course he has a whole series of abandoned chairs on Flickr.

Coming from Adelaide — as of course you do too, Andrew — I never could understand why Sydneysiders were so lazy, and lacked such basic civic pride, as to just turf stuff out into the street like some third-world slum.

The Other Andrew said...

Stil, if you click through to the Flickr versions of the photos you'll see that I dedicated the chair pics to 'Pong! :) In honour of his contributions to the oeuvre!

I think the reason that people discard on the streets here is that curbside salvage is more common in areas like Newtown. All the young university crowd etc furnishing on the cheap. I used to live in Darlinghurst and no furniture would be on the street for an hour before someone would snap it up, unless it was really broken of course.