How much can be read about life in an inner city suburb from the messages inscribed on its pavements?

For several weeks in late 1999 I walked the streets of Newtown with my camera, recording the gallery of works on the ground. Newtown is a lively inner suburb of Sydney, Australia. It is home to students, anarchists, academics, addicts, families traditional and non-traditional, tribes, remnants of its earlier working class population and, increasingly, yuppies following the trend to inner city living. King Street, its long Victorian shopping strip, is continually being transformed and these days is visited, especially at the weekends, by hoards of 'tourists' from other parts of Sydney seeking entertainment in its restaurants, cafes, bookshops, second-hand shops, pubs and gay bars.

When I first decided to do a photographic survey of writing on Newtown streets, I already had some expectations about what I would find, but I really had no conception of how many messages I would encounter.

In cities we are accustomed to having our eyes drawn to messages on vertical surfaces. Businesses, government authorities, advertisers and graffitists utilise existing vertical spaces (like walls, shop fronts, railway cuttings, buses and bus shelters) to grab our attention. Or they erect structures (like billboards, neon lights, sandwich boards, telephone booths and signposts) specifically to carry their messages. But the smooth surfaces of the pavement offer a free, alternative backdrop and, once I started looking, I discovered that there are many different kinds of communicators who exploit this opportunity.

Especially noticeable in Newtown are the many small, arcane messages stencilled on the footpaths. Curiosity about these was what prompted me to begin my survey. My Tomasonian mission was to document these and any other forms of horizontal communication I saw.

In order to contain the exercise, I intentionally limited the survey in several ways. I took photographs mostly of messages on the ground, and very few on vertical surfaces, not even for comparison; I concentrated on works that had been made deliberately, not accidentally; I only walked around Newtown and parts of the adjoining suburbs; and I did not stray further afield, not even into Sydney University; where the ground is sometimes rich with ephemeral graffiti. Despite these limitations, over a period of several weeks, from September to November 1999, I took some 400 photographs.

What I discovered was that the pavement, that essential element of the urban environment, offers more than support and protection for feet and wheels. It is a complex document, rich in information about social relations and cultural practices. In Newtown the messages are particularly thick on the ground.

While the pavement itself is sometimes the message, there are also many other forms of communication for which the pavement is used as the substrate. Conversations are carried out between and among private individuals, government authorities at local and higher levels, and commercial interests. In wet-cement inscriptions alone I found expressions of identity, community, love, hate, discontent, defiance, authority Ð and humour. Other kinds of pavement writing are equally revealing. They invite detailed examination.

So far I have sorted all these messages into a kind of catalogue and then begun to explore some of meanings embedded in them and the relationships between them. But I have only just scratched the surface.

For this website I have listed the headings in my Ground Level Gallery's catalogue. You can click on some of these categories for a picture and a brief discussion.

I would love to have your comments on the Ground Level Gallery. Please email me on raven@zip.com.au