|
July 15, 2009
I've been photographing in Adelaide city and trying to develop some sort of theme about urban life amidst the transformations that are taking place in the urban form and the shift to sustainability. I'm struggling with both working up a theme for the project and how to construct a non-linear narrative.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, supermarket trolley, Adelaide, 2009
It was with interest that I read Cory Doctorow's “Snitchtown” at Forbes.com in 2007 about the proliferation of CCTVs. by the surveillance state. These cameras are increasingly everywhere and yet there are ever more restrictions on us taking photos in the city. This surveillance is justified in the name of fighting the war on terrorism by the surveillance state.
However, there are no terrorists in Adelaide and Australia has been slow to join the conservative's
‘surveillance revolution’. In South Australia it is the law and order politics of the Rann Government (fueled by Murdoch's right -wing tabloid---The Advertiser) ---that sits behind the pressure for increasing surveillance of the street in the neo-liberal city. An extensive CCTV system is necessary to to demonstrate that the city council and state government's are ‘tough on crime’ and stamp down on threats from the enemy within.
Doctorow says that the trick is to contain the creeping cameras of the law. When the city surveils its citizens, it legitimizes our mutual surveillance:
we need to reclaim the right to record our own lives as they proceed. We need to reverse decisions like the one that allowed the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority to line subway platforms with terrorism cameras, but said riders may not take snapshots in the station. We need to win back the right to photograph our human heritage in museums and galleries, and we need to beat back the snitch-cams rent-a-cops use to make our cameras stay in our pockets.
There is a photographic project by Emma Byrne that illustrates Doctorow's "Snitchtown" essay.
So we have the politics of law and order that is designed to hide the consequences of neoliberal rule; consequences such as the effects from welfare cutbacks, privatisation and under investment in various social services. The neoliberal urban spaces are erasing the ‘traces’ of inequality with the construction of new iconic architecture monuments that strategically remove the poor, the dirt and dilapidation of the older industrial city that attract those deemed to be "undesirable."
|
In the city there a process of social removal, a removal that attempts to render ‘invisible’ the undesirables (eg., the poor, homeless and young street kids) . This is a process of ‘moving them on’.