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ctfchallenge | all galleries >> Challenge 75: My Town >> Challenge 75: Eligible > Demolition site in Ultimo 1*
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26-FEB-2005 dvd_luvva

Demolition site in Ultimo 1*

Ultimo is an inner suburb of Sydney. The buildings in this suburb date back to not long after white settlement of Australia. It used to be a commercial and light industrial area of factories and warehouses. Many of these buildings have been abondoned for decades, but now they are being demolished and replaced with apartment blocks.

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ctfchallenge28-Feb-2005 10:21
No worries mate, she's apples!
dvd_luvva
Rod 28-Feb-2005 09:59
Gday Peter, you put your points very well indeed. I totally agree with everything you have to say as your shots in a normal context are about your town & very well done, I can find no faults with any of them. I don't know if you have been following these challenges at all but keeping the posters here on topic is as Don puts it, "is like trying to herd cats":-) So this is where I'm coming from for this challenge. We have had glorious sunsets & silhouettes, night shots that show me nothing about the town & the close ups of gawd knows what else. So for the sake of this challenge I just classed your two shots as sort of close ups because I couldn't see the area these were shot in. If I let them through other posters would have posted heaps of shots that said nothing about their town pictorially speaking & would have referred me to your shots as to why I should allow their shots. These challenges are a bit of fun & not to be taken too seriously, even though I can tell you are a serious photographer & serious photographers are driven nuts here:-) So I hope you understand my classing your shots as off topic. But leave them in as it's not a serious competition. Hope to see you posting again mate:-)
dvd_luvva 27-Feb-2005 23:42
Hi Rod,

I do think that this image conveys something of the "character and essence" of my town. It is an area that is moving from being an old commercial and industrial area to being an area of medium to high density housing, and being gentrified along the way.

A single picture, or even three pictures, can't convey everything about this, but it can tell a bit of a story. I'm trying to show in my picture a warehouse that was abandoned by its owners to the extent that they couldn't be bothered cleaning off the graffiti - why not? Didn't they care? Did they know that the building was soon to be no more? Perhaps they like street art? Was ownership in dispute?

We can also see that young people in inner city Sydney are much like young people in Brooklyn, Birmingham or Bari - they like to leave a mark, be a little rebellious, in the form of graffiti.

I was also trying to raise the question of what happens when all the old buildings have gone? Will we have lost something? Should we be worried when what qualifies as "old" in Sydney (less than two hundred years old), is a bit of a joke to Europeans who live in eight hundred year old houses. But if we don't worry, how will we ever have buildings that are eight hundred years old?

There is a context to the photos - they are in a gallery called "Your Town". I believe that a photojournalist is not restricted to cliched shots of roofs, or across streets, to tell a story about a town.

I have questions about all the neighbourhoods shown in the gallery. For instance, what are black and white relations like? How divided is the community over the Iraq war? Is there much unemployment? Do you get many tourists? But I accept it is up to the artist to tell their own story about their town.

So, by all means, tell me I ddin't do this very well, or I produced a weak image of little interest. But I don't accept that the pictures are "off topic" because there is "no context".

Regards,
Peter
Rod 27-Feb-2005 11:13
Wellcome DVD Luv, You have taken some nice shots around Ultimo But for this challenge we need to see the context these buildings are in by showing us the street & surroundings these demolitions are in, so we can get a better idea of what your Ultimo looks like. So this one is off topic mate:-) If you were a girl this shot would just make it into on topic:-)