Photosharing on Flickr:intangible heritage and emergent politics

This paper argues that Flickr, a popular 'photosharing' website, is facilitating new public engagements with world heritage sites like the Sydney Opera House. Australian heritage institutions (namely libraries and museums) have recently begun to employ Flickr as a site through which to engage communities with their photographic archives and collections. Yet Flickr is more than an 'online photo album': it is a social and cultural network generated around personal photographic practices. Members can form 'groups': self-organised communities defined by shared interests in places, photographic genres, or the appraisal of photographs. These groups are public spaces for both visual and textual conversations - complex social negotiations involving personal expression and collective identity. For one group, the common interest is the Sydney Opera House, and their shared visual and textual expressions - representations of this building. This paper argues that such socio-visual practices themselves constitute an intangible heritage. By drawing on the work of scholars Jose Van Dijck and Nancy Van House, Dawson Munjeri and Michael Warner, the paper proposes that this enactment of intangible heritage is implicated in the broader cultural value of the Sydney Opera House

Rematerialising Heritage

The Rocks is one of Sydney's premier tourist locations; its identity largely founded on the perception of it as a historically significant site. This perception is steeped in complex notions of the `authentic tourist experience offered at The Rocks, which arguably originates from the retention of some of the early streets and architectures of the area. However, implicit in the act of retention is also the act of deletion. Throughout the area of The Rocks, gaps exist. These are the spaces where buildings, houses, outhouses, lanes and indeed whole streets have been eradicated to make way for urban progress or to redefine areas of the city according to political or economic aims. Heritage here is constructed, not only from that which is retained and preserved but also from that which is deleted and destroyed. This paper seeks to examine the fate of one particular street in the Rocks Princes Street that was eradicated in 1927 to make way for the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The physical demolition of the street and subsequent erasure of any material sign of it has effectively allowed the street to disappear. The predominant historical narrative that results reveals the extent to which current notions of the past are fundamentally understood through the existence of the material artefact. Yet this paper argues that definitions of the past can be drawn, not only from the material or architectural object that operates as historical proof but also from the social, performative and touristic acts that might be undertaken around the object, the architecture or even its representation

Tourist Snapshot: The Mediating Gaze of the Sydney Opera House

There has already been much scholarly work produced about the Sydney Opera House, discussing the production of its architecture, historical and political context, and its symbolic meaning to Sydney. However little scholarly attention has been paid to the way this building is represented through tourist practices of photography. The essay attempts to bring an architectural perspective to the study of this tourist practice, which is usually addressed from the disciplines of cultural geography, sociology and anthropology. The essay considers the above questions by the analysis of some 300 images sourced from the photo sharing website Flickr (www.flickr.com). It draws on John Urry's notion of the 'tourist gaze' which describes how places are structured and regulated by the visual. The essay then uses Jonas Larsen's work, which position tourist photography as a performance of social relations to argue that the activity of photographing the Sydney Opera House is more than a ritual of consumption, and can be seen as an embodied performance located at the intersection of space, experience and image

A Dish-rack Full of Crockery': Social Significance and the Sydney Opera House

The sculptural roof forms of the Sydney Opera House regularly attract visual analogies in the public mind. Although they are mostly referred to as âsailsâ or âshellsâ they have also been described through humorous metaphors like âa dishrack full of crockeryâ. This particular visual pun, is a reference to a linocut by Eric Thake, produced in 1972, the year before the official opening of the Sydney Opera House. This analogy and its continued popularity to date evidences the social and cultural life of this building. Much of the scholarly on the Sydney Opera House investigates the architecture and the circumstances of its realisation, whilst its reception and social significance, has received little systematic attention. Through Thakeâs linocut, the paper discusses the current limitations in evaluating social significance in an Australian heritage context and proposes an alternative perspective to this problem through two scholars who bring âsubjective experienceâ to bear on the production of meaning. For Gillian Rose, visual artefacts become significant through their embodied experience, whilst Ann Game argues for the inclusion of such usually-excluded subjects like desire, memory, time and the body in the construction of meaning. By bringing these theories to bear on a specific example - Eric Thakeâs visual metaphor for the Sydney Opera House - the paper investigates a new approach to social significance

Participatory Culture as a Site for the Reception of Architecture: Making a Giant Sydney Opera House Cake

For Australia Day 2011, a cake production and decorating company named Planet Cake recruited volunteers to participate in the making of a 1:50 scale, edible replica of the Sydney Opera House. Whilst this event can be characterised as simply part of the building's uptake in popular culture, through Henry Jenkins' scholarship on participatory culture, the making of the cake can equally be conceptualised as a site for the reception of this particular building and place. Drawing on scholarship that describes the historic role of cake as the centrepiece of social occasions, and the increasing interest in Jenkins' concept of participatory culture as the use of social media platforms grows, this essay argues that practices such as cake making and decorating are possible sites for understanding some of the significance of the Sydney Opera House in the lives of its publics

Souveniring the Sydney Opera House

The Sydney Opera House attracts over four million visitors each year to experience its architecture, events and cultural narratives. This experience consciously engages tourists in a constructed spatial encounter, in which the tourist has the opportunity to experience the architecture of this canonical modernist building. This experience often culminates with the purchase of a souvenir, a seemingly innocuous act, but one that is highly revealing of the interrelation between the tourist's experience, the architecture and the souvenir. There has already been much scholarly work on the Sydney Opera House, discussing its architecture, the historical and political context of its commission and its symbolic meaning within the City of Sydney. Less attention however has been paid to the relationship between architecture, experience and memory, as embodied by the souvenir. The tea towels, snow domes, table lights and key rings which depict the Sydney Opera House are, as Celeste Olalquiaga states "static and idealized blueprint... of an experience." This raises debate over what exactly is souvenired; is it the building? The experience? Cultural cachet? What can be revealed about the architecture of the Sydney Opera House, through its souvenirs? Architecture, like souvenirs is party to questions of representation, abstraction and scale. By drawing upon the work of Stewart and Olalquiaga, on the experience of souvenirs, the essay takes an architectural position from which to discuss the way models as objects of architecture and souvenir miniatures are the material representations which commemorate and facilitate a dynamic and ephemeral experience of this building. In this way revealing souvenirs as more than markers of travel, but as Stewart asserts, containers of the cultural narratives, desires and myths, which surround such an iconic architectural destination

Snap, Post, Share: Understanding the Online Social Life of Personal Photography

Cook and Garduno Freeman argue that social networks such as Flickr function as public repositories of personal photography that challenge and democratize the authority of traditional institutions of memory, like libraries and museums. Vernacular photography on these systems increases the visibility of individual's self-representation. In contrast to institutional collections, members on Flickr self-select the subject matter in their photographic contributions, the methods of representation, and the modes of participation

Georgian Eyes - Hyde Park Barracks

Joint Exhibitor for Photographic Exhibition with Adrian Boddy. Work photographed: Hyde Park Barracks, using film and digital photographic techniques to draw out the architecture's social history, architectural interventions and aesthetic structure

Place? Lugar? Sitio? Framing Place and Placemaking Through Latin American Contexts

In English speaking cultures, the term place refers to site‐specific qualities of attachment. Place, place-making, sense of place, are all terms derived from this central concept that have been taken up in various fields of research. Despite its widespread take‐up, the term place is anglo‐centric and culturally specific. In the UK, USA and Australia, the concept of place, and by extension placemaking is enshrined in legislation through statutory community engagement requirements. Yet in the Spanish language there is no direct translation of place‐words such as Lugar, Sitio, or Ambiente appear not to have the same connotations of attachment or the augmented perception and cultural importance of Englishs place. The aim of this chapter is to examine English and Spanish literature on place in conjunction with design projects (i.e. urban spaces) across a selection of Anglophone and Ibero‐American countries where thematic characteristics of place are exhibited. We intend to use Australia, Mexico and Spain, countries with which the authors have national connections to frame (i.e. encuadrar) and begin to understand their respective in‐country community based application(s). The framing/encuadrado of these terms (i.e. place/placemaking) is not done as a means to compare Western vs. Ibero‐American constructs of place and related terms; nor to identify where similarities and differences may or may not occur. Rather, this encuadrado is used as a means to present alternative constructs to these terms that may, more appropriately, be applied in Ibero‐American cultures and in the creation of positively perceived participatory urban contexts and settings