Big Day in Little Sydney

Videographer Keith Loutit is spending a year filming Sydney in tilt-shift time-lapses, such as this one of the city’s Mardi Gras celebration, above. What does Loutit’s reduction of urban life to miniature tell us about the city he’s working in? And what does tilt-shift photography say about humanity and its built environments? Is it speaking to the individual’s subjection to a grander design? Or does a format that makes people, vehicles, and cities look like models mean to say something about the artificiality of society, about the constructed nature of culture?

Most of Loutit’s videos focus the city’s primary public spaces, its harbor and its beaches. Yet his Little Sydneysiders are no more subsumed to the grandiosity of nature than they are lost in the crowd of the urban carnival. Rather, their lives revolve around a harbor and ocean that have been more or less tamed and harnessed by the city around them – relatively harmless even in the most extreme circumstances, as this dramatic rescue video illustrates. Below is a montage of a busy day in Sydney Harbor, as crisscrossed by boats, ships, and ferries as any square in New York or London is by pedestrians and cars. Appearing like playspaces for tiny toys, Sydney’s watched and controlled public realms appear to be just what Loutit titles them: “bathtubs”.

Crows Nest Street Fair

Most of Sydney’s oldest and now busiest roads were built on ridges of the sandtone that much of Sydney lies on. At the junction of five of these roads, about five kilometres from the Sydney CBD is the suburb of Crows Nest. Aptly named because it towers above much of Sydney. Even in the low rise office block I work in, I can see seventy kilometres to the west and south and to the Pacific Ocean in the east.

Whilst Crows Nest could never hope to match the liveliness of Sydney’s eastern suburbs, it has a vitality rarely matched in Sydney’s north. Here are some photos from the Crows Nest Street Fair taken on Sunday, 15th of October 2006.

Children and adults alike trying to catch bead chains being thrown from the awning of a building.

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