CONTACT’s first offline publication is set to release 28/11/2020 – “Self Help In The Suburbs” is a visual diary, documenting anonymous street messages and throwaway photos – By Perth Based artist and photographer J. Walker, the book catalogues images collected from 2015-2020. The images travel throughout Perth, Melbourne and Vietnam streets along side a passage of time growing up and experiencing life within suburbia. In essence, the project curates experiences captured in throwaway photos, re-evaluating their position in Walker’s life and his mass of photos spread across five years of iPhones, iPods, and cameras. A further interest explored is messages made by anonymous people, dubbed ‘civilian graffiti’ or ‘writing on walls’. These messages are photographed and republished in the book to be experienced and broadcasted again, subverting their original obscurity as the messages are often specific and private in context, but public and vague when viewed on the street or in an alley. 

To find this kind of writing you have to know where to look, and where to look is often places that are not often to be looked at. Every alley must be walked, every corner must be checked. Slowly a visual criteria is built wherein Walker is able to spot these writings everywhere within his world. Even if a message does not speak to anyone, it speaks to the location it is marked and to the day it is photographed and collected, much like the images of past moments.

Phone photos come and go like writing on walls, they are created then obscured by the visual information and volume of day to day life. Who do these messages speak to? Do these messages speak purely to the street, or to those who will listen, or read them, or write a message in return? Where then does the message speak when it is contained within a digital consciousness, do the messages speak to one another? Do the photos of lost times and past memories look at the messages written on walls? Do they long to exist again in the real world?