Re-meeting Adelaide
After a decade working interstate and overseas, photographer Bri Hammond is reacquainting herself with Adelaide in style.
It’s a familiar tale; a country kid who knows they’re destined for the city. As it was for Tumby Bay-born Bri Hammond, who says she was “always drawn to a bigger place … ready for the big smoke”.
Bri is currently the photographer in residence at The Mill, a multi-arts hub in the heart of Adelaide. This is Bri’s second summer in her home state since returning after more than a decade away, but it’s our first as new friends.
We chat over sweating drinks and under mercifully icy air-conditioning in a city cafe. I find myself talking about Adelaide as if it were akin to a London or New York and Bri agrees, saying it’s Adelaide’s creative and supportive atmosphere that has drawn her back to South Australia.
After studying graphic design in Adelaide Bri left for overseas, spending a year in Italy, which inspired a love of photography. She returned to Australia – Melbourne this time – where she studied commercial photography and then worked for 10 years. But after having a baby in 2022, she yearned more for home and family. However, before relocating to Adelaide, Bri took a 17,000km detour to Edinburgh, where her husband is from, spending two months there, also brainstorming how to reacquaint herself with Adelaide’s creative scene.
“So, I came up with a series called Meeting Adelaide where I connect with creatives one-on-one. They take me anywhere they want – they show me a cafe, restaurant, beach, the circus – and we talk about everything and I photograph them too,” she explains.
I ask her what the most unexpected moment as part of Meeting Adelaide has been so far and she’s quick to pick out the time she spent with award-winning set designer Jonathon Oxlade.
“Jonathan suggested we meet in Semaphore and we just explored. The Foreshore Carnival was on, with all the rides,” Bri says. “The workers there were so kind! They let us go on the carousel as much as we wanted. I started to feel ill, but it made for some good shots.”
Jonathon Oxlade. This picture: Bri Hammond
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Bri says she loves being back in SA.
“You come down the freeway, through the Hills, you’re like, ‘Oh, we’re home!’ and ‘There’s the yellow, blue and red buses!’,” she says.
Bri says Adelaide is underrated for how it supports its artists, and that this support encourages her to create because she feels more connected. She loves that “the worlds of art, music and theatre are more integrated here”.
“When I first moved back to Adelaide, I was working from home until I won the residency at The Mill,” she says. “Before that, I wasn’t connecting with anyone. There was a sense of, ‘are we even in Adelaide?’”
Bri says the best parts of her residency have been finding community and having her own studio space at The Mill.
“My new body of work never would’ve happened without it,” she says.
“There’s a quote from photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, ‘You just have to live and life will give you pictures’. I lived by this quote for years, but since becoming a parent I found that there wasn’t much living going on outside my house, which made creating new images difficult. Creating this still life series helped me explore how my current phase of life can inform my work.”
Bri returns to her own childhood through her new exhibition, Object Permanence, which is showing as part of Adelaide Fringe. Her photographs explore the relationship between objects and memory; she arranges nostalgic items in careful tableaus: think game pieces, plastic toy furniture, rocks collected across generations.
“The project started from a deflated green balloon I found at home – it kept haunting me!”
This picture: Bri Hammond
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Bri explains that her son, now a toddler, would move this deflated balloon around the house and she’d keep discovering it in different places. One moment it would be sitting on a window sill, the next a shelf, the next the kitchen table…and suddenly, she had an urge to photograph it.
“Then, I thought, ‘what if I pull these photographable moments out of the home and into the studio; give them a new stage?’” she says.
Colour, texture, tension and balance pop in every frame; from seashells lined neatly on a sand-yellow towel, to Viewfinder film sandwiched perilously (yet perfectly) between a toy bird and a green balloon.
I draw an inevitable comparison to the “accidentally Wes Anderson” TikTok trend and Bri laughs, “That was my aesthetic before it was cool!”.
“A lot of items were my mum’s when she was a kid; lots of ‘70s Barbie furniture,” Bri says.
“I opened a box and inside were 30 little hairbrushes. Every Barbie came with one. I remembered the tactile feeling of brushing awful plastic hair,” she says, faux retching at the memory.
This picture: Bri Hammond
A wisp of hair is visible in the hairbrush photo. Barbie’s hair or Bri’s own? She doesn’t know.
“I’ve always been a perfectionist. I clean up dust in photos. But with this series I strictly told myself ‘I can’t clean up’,” she says. “The hero shot with the green balloon in it? Up close the balloon is grubby – you can almost feel the texture of the dusty rubber.”
While Bri returned to Adelaide seeking familiarity, she is embracing imperfection and the unexpected, while capturing people, places, objects and stories in her charmingly offbeat style.
Object Permanence is showing at the Exhibition Space, 154 Angas Street until March 28.
Follow Bri’s Meeting Adelaide series on her website: brihammond.com.
And keep your eyes peeled – applications for The Mill’s next Photographer in Residence will open soon.