Melbourne is a city that sells itself on liveability. For a growing number of its young residents, that promise has become increasingly difficult to believe.
This project is a photographic investigation into the housing crisis as it is experienced by students and young adults in Melbourne, not through the lens of extreme vulnerability, but through the quiet, accumulative weight of ordinary precarity. Where broader documentary discourse on the housing crisis has tended to focus on the most marginalised, this work turns its attention to those who remain largely invisible within that conversation: the people who are working, studying, and trying to build a life in a city that is making that harder every year.
This work draws on the tradition of investigative documentary photography — spending time with each subject in their home, often sharing a meal, before any images are made. The resulting images are not portraits of suffering. They are portraits of space, the particular, intimate details that reveal how people make meaning within constrained environments. Toothbrushes, cracked ceilings, cluttered fridges, doorbells. The visual language is deliberately quiet, resisting spectacle in favour of specificity.
The choice of newsprint as the final format is itself a conceptual decision. Cheap, immediate, and public, the newspaper positions this work within a tradition of civic documentation. The detachable poster insert extends that logic further, designed to be pasted up around Melbourne, returning the work to the city it documents and to the people it concerns.
Designed to be read, shared, and torn out and pasted up on the walls of the very city it documents. It asks to be seen by the people walking past. By the commuters and the landlords and the lawmakers. By the 62% of Melburnians who rent, and by the ones who have forgotten what that feels like.
This is not a project about suffering. It is a project about the cost of an ordinary life and the extraordinary effort it now takes to live one.