Arts Monday 1 August 2011

'Walkabout' © Louise Hawson. Suburb No 28: Redfern, Tuesday, March 23, 2010.

ArtiFacts, Eastside.

Join me, Jane Raffan, for a program devoted to community.

I’ll be interviewing Louise Hawson, the photographer and blogger behind the 52 Suburbs exhibition at the Museum of Sydney.

As the exhibition reveals, Louise Hawson woke up one day and realised she was a stranger in her own city.

And then she set herself a mission:  to explore and photograph one new Sydney suburb a week for a whole year.

How well do you know your city? How far do your notions about community extend beyond your immediate neighbourhood? These are some of the ideas that crop up in Louise’s blog about her wanderings in parts of Sydney she’d not before travelled to or explored, or even thought about.

At the heart of the blog and the exhibition is the portrayal of ‘beauty in the burbs’ captured through Louise’s photography, which celebrates the vibrancy, multiculturalism and community of Sydney’s localities in a refreshingly unconventional way.

Louise’s journey echoes that of Charles Beaudelaire’s famous literary flâneur, a person who walks the city in order to experience it; a connoisseur of the fleeting richness of city life.  The idea of the flâneur has accumulated significant meaning over time and has come to be a referent for understanding urban phenomena and modernity.

The flâneur, like Louise, is a highly poetic figure. Louise’s photographs, taken on her meanderings around 52 Suburbs, depict people, objects, images and words in combinations that reverberate in ways to create a vibrant sense of place. And they are beautiful.

Louise’s blog and first stop on her tour of the burbs: http://www.52suburbs.com/2009/09/photobucket_7552.html

The program’s music will be a mix of jazz and R&B, and a twang or two…with vocal and instrumental tracks on getting out and about in the city, seeing the sights, the streets and a host of reasons why people wander them.

And a special thanks to those of you who called in during last week’s program. If you have questions or suggestions about the Arts Monday programs you can also reach me at jraffan@ArtiFacts.net.au.

I look forward to your company.

Jane

www.ArtiFacts.net.au