Campbell Walker
i: @apocalypsefatigue
"Campbell Walker is a photographer based in Naarm. He has been a working artist since the late 1990s, when he made what was generally but incorrectly described as New Zealand’s first digital feature, Uncomfortable Comfortable, made in 1999 on 100% obsolete analogue video equipment. He has since also worked as a writer, curator, performance artist and now primarily photographer.
He is currently focused on exploring the industrial zones of the city on foot and by public transport, going to places where appearances are often less rigorously managed. The idea is to record the patina left by decades of time and work across landcapes, ecosystems and structures. This is done using analogue lenses on a digital body, in-camera without editing. The photos submitted for Afterglow have been shot in May 2026."
Fading light over the old raceway, Fisherman’s Bend, 5:18 pm, 11/05/2026
2026, Archival inkjet print (digital photography),
42 x 59.4 cm
$300
I have taken this open theme of illumination and its reverse and tried to build a narrative of the city through three photos.
Fading light over the old raceway… is shot looking westward across an old raceway in Fisherman’s Bend. It’s now a go-karting club, but they held drag races there from the 1950s to the 1970s, and before that it was an aerodrome in the 1920s. Fisherman’s Bend used to be a remote industrial part of the city and is filled with either demolished or partly demolished factory buildings that for now seem to be lying fallow. They’re waiting for a much-heralded state government initiative to turn the area into a massively upgraded innovation hub announced in the 2010s, but there seems a failure to launch. Infrastructure investment never arrived and keynote investors like the University of Melbourne have gotten cold feet. Walking through the area now, it still feels more like the industrial backwater, somehow holding onto the afterglow of a mostly undocumented social history. Who knows how long these crumbling vestiges can last in the violences of the contemporary city.