_ On Parramatta Road _
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As part of our collaboration with Elizabeth St gallery, FLINT is curating the work of their documentary photographers.
The Elizabeth St gallery does away with the confines of sterile & perfectly lit white walls for the grime of inner city streets illuminated by natural and street lighting. With the aim of rejuvenating Sydney’s Elizabeth St and its surrounding cultural vacuum, by allowing the public to look into a mirror to see repressed realities, and other worlds at their feet.
[dropcap]Often[/dropcap] Branded one of Australia’s worst road, Parramatta Road was also the first, beginning as a inter-settlement dirt track between two colonies. Once populated by Indigenous tribes and bushrangers, I aim to restore the sense of journey in the road that takes people to and from work each day.
Parramatta Road is notorious as a problematic traffic artery. Commuters try to avoid it. Councils try to fix it. I simply aim to know it.
I meet, interview and document the businesses that don’t fit into shopping malls, the sparse pedestrians, the thriving and vanishing industries across around 20 suburbs of western Sydney.
While government and media debate how to improve Parramatta Road, it quietly gets away with being more interesting than you might think. The road changes each day: sign by sign, block by building, business by business. I go into the crevices to reveal something of the old and weary beast the way it is today, for future reference.
Parramatta Road is an ongoing project. – Lyndal Irons
Lyndal Irons is a photographer and writer from Sydney. In 2013 she was chosen as one of the top four Australian photographers under 30 in the Qantas Spirit of Youth Awards (SOYA) and as a finalist in SUNSTUDIOS emerging photographer competition. Her series Parramatta Road was exhibited in 2011 at Global Gallery, Paddington, and also in Add On (2012) as part of the Head On Photo Festival. Images from the series have been selected as finalists in the 2011 and 2012 Sydney Life exhibitions in Hyde Park in Sydney, Australia, as part of the Art and About Festival. Her work is held in the collection of the State Library of New South Wales. Check her work here: lyndalirons.com.au
If you are in Sydney or plan to visit the city soon, check out the Elizabeth St gallery. You can find info about them and directions to the exposition here: Elizabeth St gallery.
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