Category: Flânography

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Street art, Hanna lane, South Melbourne, by Dean Kyte.
Street art, Hanna lane, South Melbourne.  Shot on Kodak T-MAX 400 film.

‘Melbourne style’ is the dogleg laneway off the main thoroughfare of high-street fashion.  It doesn’t think outside the box: it takes the boxes out of the National Gallery of Victoria just up St Kilda road, glues them to a mechanic’s wall, and reimagines them as many pixels adding up to a graffito’d digital daguerreotype.

You don’t have to wander far off the beaten track of the tramline to find Melbourne style.  If you’re heading to South Melbourne Beach, you can roll off the No. 1, turn down a cobbled laneway off Sturt street, and à deux pas, find yourself in this plein air gallery of salon-hung street art.

I stumbled on this cobbled coin one dreary winter afternoon.  It had just rained and the sky was the same colour as the asphalt.  A stiff wind blew me capriciously along a route I hadn’t taken before in my flâneries.

I had four shots left on the roll and didn’t expect to have my æsthetic antennæ tweaked anymore that day when I twigged to this vintage gent redux.

I love it when you turn a corner and Melbourne surprises you with an unexpected spectacle which colourfully interrupts the grey livery.

Melbourne style takes couture out of Chapel street and plunks it in the laneway.

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Highlander lane, night, by Dean Kyte
Highlander lane, night. Shot on Kodak Tri-X 400 film.  Shutter speed: 30.  Aperture: f.2.82.  Focal range: infinity.

Melbourne transforms itself into a foreign wonderland at night.  Armed with my Pentax K1000, I venture forth after-hours to capture ‘a Brassaï moment’—the moment when Highlander lane, between Flinders street and Flinders lane, reminds me of the square Caulaincourt in Paris—the setting of my first book, Orpheid: L’Arrivée (2012).

As a writer, I move from obscurity to clarity.  For me, writing is a flânerie through the chiaroscuro of consciousness and unconsciousness.  I enjoy the frisson of venturing into dark places which are foreign to me—like alighting from a taxi in a cosmopolitan European locale late at night, not sure where you are, barely speaking the language, some menacing silhouettes in the milieu to greet you.

Before I was ever a Melbourne Flâneur, I was a flâneur in Paris, the Mecca of flânerie.  In L’Arrivée I wrote about my experience of feeling both fearful and fearless, arriving alone, late at night, in a small Parisian square in Montmartre.  Despite barely speaking the language, I had a strange sprezzatura, a strange confidence in myself—in my mission and message as an artist—going forward.

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