Looking Back by Chris Lermanis
By Chris Lermanis
Further to my book launch :
In 2015 Loretta Florance in a review of my photographic exhibition at The Colour Factory for the ABC wrote:
In 2015, a two-bedroom terrace house in inner-city Fitzroy is likely to cost you around $1 million, but 50 years ago the Victorian Government was in the process of razing them to the ground.
In the late 1960s Chris Lermanis was in his early 20s and living in Brighton, and to him Fitzroy was one of the most interesting places in Melbourne.
The neighbourhood was in transition, as the Housing Commission of Victoria (HCV) cleared the way for the highrises that stand there today.
“They were sort of bulldozing and clearing existing houses, which I imagine were called slums by the people who were doing it,” Mr Lermanis said.
Armed with “very basic camera equipment” and heavily influenced by photographers like Henri Cartier Bresson, a young Mr Lermanis set out capturing the moment in time.
“There were narrowed lanes, and cobbled streets, and very dingy sort of byways, and all that was to disappear,” he said.
“There were a number of streets that disappeared under that block Atherton Street was on, and I suppose that's why they've called it the Atherton Estate.”
I called the exhibition “The Fitzroy Narrows” and it depicted a changing streetscape with the people who were residents there.
I have published a photographic documentary of that time and it should be of interest to past and present residents. The book launch is at the Fitzroy Library Reading Room on Monday October 14 at 6:30pm.
