Josephine Tovey

URBAN AFFAIRS

PLACES of gaping, open space and industrial decay like the Carlton United Brewery site in Chippendale are a property developer’s dream; ripe for high-rise and high-density development, for cement render and walls of glass. But they are also muse to artists like the Herald photographer Tamara Dean, who scours the city with her camera searching for what she describes as ‘‘last wildvestiges’’ of urban space. Producing her latest exhibition of photographs, This Too Shall Pass, Dean found a city in which the imperative is to build and grow and these empty spaces are becoming harder to find.‘‘In Sydney, and Australia, it seems to me there’s a really strong sense of denial about decay in life and death,’’ she said.‘‘There’s this constant emphasis on trying to knock down and rebuild and not allowing, in a visual way, for us to kind of feel that we’re in a world that does decay. ’’Dean, who was the recipient of last year’s Sydney Life Photography Prize, explores places that have long been cordoned off from the public – some are building sites, others crumbling former industrial spaces. ‘‘I like to go to places where you have to be careful where you step, where you’re not being carefully protected and held in,’’ she said. In The Keeper, right, a gamine looking child stands astride the rubble in front of a heritage-listed though decrepit Carlton brewery stack as if it were her newly conquered castle.‘‘You can imagine [the girl] running around and calling out –there’s this sense of owning space and not being told what to do,’’ Dean said. All of the sites have been transformed in some way since she photographed them. Last week the state government approved project applications from Frasers Property for several new buildings on the brewery site, which has been renamed Central Park, including two residential towers with atotal of 593 apartments. In another image, ThePack, a young woman sits amid debris at the old Tempe tip, a pack of wild looking dogs surrounding her and heavy storm clouds over head. That location has since been earmarked for a 37,000-square metre Ikea megastore that will be the company’s biggest in the southern hemisphere. Dean said her photographs were not necessarily a protest but a celebration of the decay the city denied itself.‘‘I don’t knowif it’s political, but it’s certainly an homage to those places.’’

This Too Shall Pass opens at CharlesHewitt Gallery,Darlinghurst, next Thursday.