Why I Photograph What I Photograph

I’ve been asked a few times why I keep photographing the same streets. The same facades, the same laneways, the same slow deterioration of the same century-old paint jobs.

The honest answer is that they’re not the same. Or not anymore.

That’s the thing about documentary photography in a neighbourhood moving as fast as Melbourne’s inner north. The subject looks stable until it isn’t. A wall you photographed a few years ago gets rendered white. A ghost sign that’s survived decades gets painted over for a mural. A facade you assumed was permanent gets demolished for a six-storey apartment block.

So you keep going back. Not because you’re obsessed (maybe because you’re obsessed), but because the archive is only useful if it’s current. The gaps are the point.

That’s what hidden__north is. An ongoing record of a neighbourhood at a specific moment in history. Not a finished project. A practice.

Most of what ends up in the archive isn’t dramatic. It’s a doorway. A hand-painted advertisement for a business that stopped trading before some of the people walking past it were born. A parapet with a decorative flourish nobody thinks to look up and see anymore. None of it is hidden from view. It’s hidden in the sense that it’s stopped registering. Fitzroy, Collingwood, Carlton, Northcote: these are streets people walk every day without looking at them, because looking at something every day is usually how you stop seeing it.

Photographing it is a way of forcing the looking. Not to romanticise decay. A peeling shopfront isn’t inherently beautiful, and I try not to shoot it as though it is. It’s more that decay is evidence. It tells you how long something has been there, what’s been layered over it, what’s about to replace it. A ghost sign is a fossil record for a street.

The practice part matters more than the photography part, if I’m honest. Any one image from the archive is just a photograph. It’s the accumulation (the same corner shot in different light, different years, sometimes different states of repair) that starts to say something about time passing in a specific place. That only works if I keep showing up.

So the same streets, again. Not because nothing changes. Because everything does, and someone has to be standing there with a camera when it does.

The archive is on the Work page, in three threads: Facades, Ghost Signs and Details.