Anyone who posts a photograph of one of the old benches at Adelaide Railway Station, lit by afternoon light, as their Facebook entry point, has ticked the right box. Alex Frayne may be a much-travelled photographer, but his heartland remains Adelaide and South Australia. Can’t go past his publisher Wakefield Press’ blurb on his 2024 Distance and Desire book:

“With an arsenal of cameras, his roving eye examines the exuberance, beauty and broken dreams of a place where both distance and desire conspire to offer the artist a daunting challenge – to visually describe this most paradoxical and baffling of states.”

Paradoxical and baffling. Now here’s one artist who just doesn’t celebrate this wide brown state in all its natural glory. He interrogates it. In his earlier series, Adelaide Noir, love and loathing stroll hand in hand down spooky back streets and jetties.

He says that he could be living anywhere and be doing the same thing. But “I happen to live in Adelaide using what’s around me.” And that one thing is taking stills. He packed this skill into his tote when, after a good hard look in the mirror, he decided some years ago to get out of town and head to America, taking his trusty analogue cameras. His self-reflection told him he was getting a bit “soft’. Maybe the images were coming too easily. Maybe he was hungry for a fresh challenge. The result has been three years on the road in south and south-western America; Los Angeles, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi. In for a month, back to Adelaide for six months, then off again.

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He shot analogue throughout, developing film from the day’s shoot in motel rooms. In the cities he lodged downtown, preferring grit to tourist glamour. On the road a daisy chain of no-tell motels, brothels next door, boozer bars, the odd biffo, burnt out schoolhouses and peeling ‘I Say Doc’ billboards. For a gimlet-eyed photographer with louche tastes, heaven.

Then there were the good citizens of this multi-faceted slice of humanity – broken down fentanyl addicts lying in the road, censorious White Knights of America (aka KKK), gun-toting doomsdayers, fancy-me sunbathers, loud and proud drag queens – the full menagerie – posing, preening and glaring at the camera. Frayne found it relatively easy to get these shots; carry a camera, occasionally drop that you were an Australian, and get people talking about themselves. For a new kid in town, this talking produced leads and contacts to other parts of town. Worked fine.

Now the big deal about Manifest Destiny is that it’s been formulated as an immersive cinematic experience. The setting is Mid-West motel office meets IMAX wrap-around, inviting viewers to stand or sit in a large space while a sequence of large images is streamed on all sides. But this is not an animation. It is composed almost entirely of still shots which are enlivened and sequenced with jump cuts and fades. A driving music score (Donnie Sloan, Empire of the Sun) and slick sound engineering takes you there. An inspiration for Frayne was a 1967 film, La Jetée, a French featurette consisting of a loop story of post nuclear war time travel, listed as one of the top ten of time travel movies. For the curious, YouTube offers a taste. So Last Year at Marienbad’s time slicing wasn’t alone.

The constantly moving images create a powerful sense of motion, as if on a road trip, careering across the crumbling surface of an empire in decline. There is a hint of social commentary, but no hard line – the images speak for themselves. Minimal narrative structure suggests that this venture is still feeling its way in terms of how much to say and when to not say anything. Still images, like those displayed in the next room don’t have that problem.

Nevertheless, re-contextualising of the still image clearly offers analogue photographers like Frayne with exciting options to engage with an audience. Putting this show on the road, with the necessary equipment and venue requirements would be challenging. But Alex Frayne has an extraordinary and hard-won image bank to draw on if or when the opportunity presents.

Manifest Destiny is on display at ILA Immersive Light and Art until March 21 as part of Adelaide Festival