Melbourne 1835

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Travelling in Time Project: ''Melbourne 1835''

The city of Melbourne was founded in 1835 by European settlers.
The town had several names including Batville before being officially named Melbourne in honour of Lord Melbourne, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

For those who are lucky enough to travel and have seen Melbourne, they can see skyscrapers, parks and trees everywhere giving to the city the reputation of ''city of gardens''.

What if we could go back in time and see how Melbourne was at the time of its foundation, would we recognize the streets, the buildings, the monuments that we can still see today?
How many things changed in less than 200 years?

I had the idea of this project after a trip to Poland where I saw a few photographs of a Polish photographer showing the city ''before and after''.

Lord Melbourne - British Prime Minister

When I took the photos for this project I had the old photo as reference and I tried to find the actual spot from where the photographer took that photo more than 100 years before.
From that spot a guy took that photo and now I was there trying to take the same photo from the same angle, to do so I need to find a reference, a building that is still there, sometimes it is easy and sometimes harder but I think that the result is interesting because you can compare the two views of the same thing, probably in the future somebody else will do the same thing, I wish I could do that in another 100 - 200 years.

This is the first step because my idea is to photograph the whole city. For the exhibition ''Melbourne 1835'' I choose only a part of Melbourne: Flinders Street, Swanston Street, Elizabeth Street, Collin Street, the Parliament House and the Luna Park.

My exhibition will be at the Brunswick Street Gallery from May 7th to June 2nd, 2017.