Review: Small Business, published by M.33, Melbourne, 2021
David Wadelton understands that photography is a form of time travel. Small Business, his new book of photographs, transports us to Melbourne’s vanishing architecture of interior workplaces created by largely working-class, post-war immigrants from Europe. It forms a natural complement to his first book, Suburban Baroque (2019), which paid homage to their domestic interiors.
Both books are the product of years of wandering, especially in the rapidly gentrifying inner north of Melbourne.
Wadelton has lived in Northcote since 1975, and has long shared his massive archive of initially black-and-white photos of his beloved suburb through his Facebook moniker Northcote Hysterical Society. Social media has proved an ideal vehicle for such obsessive localism, extending to the crowd-funding campaigns he uses to underwrite the publications.