I’ve been coming here for years, but there’s so much traffic nowadays is a photographic enquiry into three locations of cultural, community and social import within the inner northern Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy North; Piedimonte’s grocery store, The Hungarian Club and the Fitzroy Bowling Club.
The images examine the lives of those who frequent these three structures and locations that exist almost as time capsules of the changing social fabric of the area, exposing the fragments of diaspora as they gel around the idea of place. The locations are neither private residences or transient places of commerce, but institutions of generational and cultural change, embodying ideas of place and (dis)placement. The idea of places vs non-places.
As globalised consumer culture devours many parts of inner Melbourne, these community spaces have felt less at home in the throes of a development boom. More like endangered species than they are celebrated native locales, these places demonstrate the decline of community hubs within the maelstrom of development, compromising where, how and who convenes in the public domain.
