Interview: Nikki Dale & Duncan Atack, Streets of Perth
Nikki Dale and Duncan Atack, who live in Perth, Australia, started sharing photos of murals and graffiti in Perth on their Facebook page Streets of Perth (SoP) in June 2014. Initially, the couple were simply sharing their interests in the city’s growing street art scene with friends and family, but what started out as a hobby quickly turned into a cultural community made of thousands of followers passionate about street art. Now SoP have more than 30,500 followers and is growing rapidly.
fluoro spoke to the couple about their inspiration, memorable moments and future aspirations for SoP.
fluoro. What inspired you to start the Streets of Perth project?
Nikki Dale: Duncan is an amateur photographer and likes going into the city and surroundings, shooting photos of the details he sees on the streets such as architecture, street art, stickers, signage, that sort of thing. I’d never really paid attention to Perth’s growing street art scene until I started looking at his photographs, then suddenly my eyes were opened to all the public art that our city has to offer.
One day he visited the Wolf Lane car park in Perth which is made up of wall-to-wall murals, and there was something about Anya Brock’s Fierce mural that just grabbed me. I told Duncan that we should really do something with his photos, just to show our family and friends what’s happening in Perth nowadays and so I started the SoP Facebook page. That was back in June last year and we were amazed when we reached 100 followers, but then those followers started sharing our photos, and more people joined the page, and more people shared our photos. Eight months later, we’ve now got 30,000+ page likes and have extended our photographs across Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and Google+ too, all via @streetsofperth.
f.Why street art?
Duncan Atack: Originally SoP was going to focus on all the details Nikki mentioned above – stickers, signage, architecture – as I find beauty in the shapes, textures and colours that people walk past every day but don’t really pay any attention to, as they’re too focused on getting to their destination. But the more street art we posted, the more we enjoyed that particular element and the page eventually evolved into an urban art appreciation blog and what we have now clearly reiterates that our audience loves murals just as much as we do.
f.How do you find new art to photograph? What research do you do?
ND: Most of the time, we just pick a new suburb to explore within the Perth metro area, and usually discover a few new pieces along the way. As the blog has grown though, we get people emailing in tips all the time, which is brilliant, and we always ensure we credit them as the ‘finder’ when we eventually post a photo of the mural they alerted us to.
We’ve also created an interactive urban art map of all the pieces we’ve posted so far over 400 and counting, which we add to every week. We’ve received such great feedback.
DA: Nikki also keeps an eye on the Facebook and Instagram feeds of the artists we follow too, just to stay up to date on any new works they might be doing so that we can get out there and snap the occasional in-progress shot as well as the finished piece. We’re lucky that quite a few of the local artists we’ve met along the way will actually send us a message in advance now, so that we can pop along to their location for a chat and take some shots of them too. We were recently invited to an apartment block where a local artist was painting a private commission inside – an incredible mural of the Andrews Sisters. By inviting us along, we were able to shoot some photos of the mural and share it with our followers, which was exciting for us because without that private access and the opportunity to publish it on SoP, only a handful of people who visited the apartment block in the future would have been lucky enough to see it.
f.What’s your most comforting or happiest moment with this project?
ND: There have been a couple of standout moments for me. The first was regarding a homeless man called Stephen. We’d been told about a new mural in a car park in the city so went to shoot it one weekend for the blog. There was a young man who sat in the corner of the car park in front of the mural, and as Duncan was setting up the shot, he said “would you like me to move my bed?” It turned out that he was homeless after breaking his leg, which led to him being unable to work, which then led to him being kicked out of his rental property. Our hearts broke for him so we gave him some money, bought him a meal from a nearby store and asked his permission to post his photo on Streets of Perth in case any of our followers would like to do the same. Within an hour of sharing his photo, we had tons of comments from people wanting to bring him food, and help him find shelter. A local physiotherapist even offered free sessions to help rehabilitate his broken leg so he could get back on his feet. Even more astonishing was, that a suggestion was made to setup a fundraising page, and by the end of the evening we’d raised $1300! That really helped to restore my faith in humanity. Later on the same evening, the Salvation Army found Stephen and worked with him and I, over the following weeks, to get the money to him and find him a room at a brand new men’s refuge in Perth. He’s moved on now and is hopefully in a better place, but it felt good to do something as a result of SoP.
DA: We also started to get comments from art teachers telling us that they show our photos to their students each day, and a mother who told us that her teenage daughter was inspired to become an artist after seeing our posts. Obviously we can’t take credit for that, as we just share other people’s amazing work, but the mum did say that by us aggregating the murals into one Facebook page, her daughter finally embraced her inner creativity, and so she didn’t worry about her emotional wellbeing so much nowadays.
f.Have you considered doing the same for other cities in Australia?
DA: We would love to extend SoP to become a national blog, but at the moment it’s just a hobby that we run in our spare time. We both work full time during the week so we spend at least one day per weekend now lurking in car parks and laneways, then we spend hours after work processing the photos and researching each piece as much as possible, so we have a good background story to tell. Maybe one day we can establish Streets of Australia – That’s the dream anyway! Perth will always be our one true love though.
f.What’s next for the Streets of Perth project?
DA: There are countless opportunities out there for us through the blog. We just need the time and funding to make it bigger and better than ever. In the meantime though, local organisations such as FORM Gallery, The Little Wing Corner Gallery, Six Two Three Zero and the Laneway Collective Perth are doing extraordinary things for Perth through new mural commissions, urban art festivals and so on. So we’re not going to run out of content any time soon.
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