Out walking, Ian North stumbled into Canberra's mythical suburban realm

Ian North's two series of photographs, Canberra suite 1980-81 and Canberra Coda 1980-81 - 24 and then seven colour photographs, printed by hand from 6x7 medium-format negatives - documents this surreal, occasionally odd set of feelings.

North's death in May, at the age of 79, prompted me to look at those photographs again, finding once more how these images convey something fundamental of the experience of life in this city.

I sent some of the images to a university friend, who came to Canberra to study and has already moved away. "I feel like I'm looking at the city like I did when I first moved there," she wrote back in a message.

Having grown up in the place, I take the suite as a chance to see Canberra as it appears to those who come here to make something of it. To see how the place appears to the outsiders whose contributions explain the real reason for the city building project.

North was appointed the first curator of photography at what was to become the National Gallery of Australia in 1980. He served in the post for four-and-a-half years. Born in New Zealand in 1945, North first came to South Australia to take up a post at the state gallery in 1971.

Aged 35, North was given the world of photography to oversee at the Australian National Gallery. He spent his working hours acquiring the core of the new gallery's photography collection. At the weekends, and after work, he took hundreds of photographs himself.

All in secret. It's a conundrum for a curator to be exhibiting and producing his own art.

"The Canberra suite [images] arose free of preconceptions; one might go for a stroll to the shops for some milk and return with three or four exposed rolls of film, at other times I would just head out and walk, endlessly, feeling like I was entering some kind of mythical realm," North told art curator Pedro de Almeida in 2012.

North had been taking pictures for years, since he received an Agfa Isolette camera in 1957, aged 12. It took longer for him to accept photography as serious art; once he did, he practised in private. In 1979, North switched to colour photography, then finding acceptance as a medium for serious art.

North's Canberra photographs were taken after much of what is thought now to be old Canberra was built. North's Canberra is clearly still a work in progress. The effort to lay in roads and shape suburbs appears here to be finished. For the moment, at least. Yet the structures of suburban life look uneasy under the vast blue skies of North's photographs.

In Canberra suite No.12 and No.13, the landscape is framed by a road barrier. While the expanse beyond may look as it did when Europeans first made it to the Limestone Plains, it is now being divided up into roads, suburbs and blocks. The intrusions of settlement will leave nothing untouched.

In No.14, the grass is gone. The rich blue of the sky remains, along with a spread of white cloud, but the foreground is replaced with a dark metal roof. In the space between the roof and the sky, scaffolding links the two. Incomplete windows look like brick castle battlements. A city's claim on the landscape - and the space above - is being staked.

There are no people in North's Canberra. Their absence reinforces that sense of this being a mythical realm. It is still possible, in my experience, to walk for extended periods through Canberra's suburbs without seeing another person. It can be a wonderful thing.

Kilometre after kilometre of footpaths connecting realms of private experience. As a teenager, I took photographs of the streets near where I grew up, perplexed by the contradictory emptiness, the quiet, the gap between the lives being lived and the absence of people, which allowed me to wander for hours, filling rolls of film, uninterrupted by any of my neighbours. I did not know then I was taking after North's example.

An open window in the house at the right of No.17 hints at the lives being lived behind a brick veneer facade. At the centre of this image, my favourite of the suite, is a eucalypt. The gardens, trees and two houses of the suburb seem to have crept in behind the tree. The newcomers are established, certainly, but without the same possible depth of roots.

In North's Canberra photographs, suburban houses appear temporary, even though brick and weatherboard suggests long-term intent. In No.18, a landscape of grass rising to a tree-dotted hill appears interrupted by a street. The houses seem to be pitched impermanently, like an encampment. It is an image of a city that is distant from our expectations of what a city is and how it should look.

No.11 is the only image that approaches anything like the official view of Canberra. By official, I mean views high up - aerial, sometimes - of the grand civic spaces or the parliamentary triangle. But instead of a usual lookout vantage, North photographs the road and the low spread of buildings towards the horizon from around the side of the hill. It is a truer image of the city's extent and progress.

It is also significant that the first image in the suite is a house under construction, timber trusses stacked for a future roof, waiting for workers who will no doubt return. North's suite is not a literal account of a city being built. Clearly, though, the place is still being assembled with great ambition - just like the incomplete, yet-to-open gallery for which North was acquiring photographs.

The Canberra suite reminds me of the photographs kept in the archives of the bodies responsible for Canberra's development, from the Mildenhall glass plate collection to the National Capital Development Commission's colour photos. Those photographs were taken to document specific achievements: a new road built, a bus stop installed, homes completed.

North's photographs are much less specific. Whereas the photographs of the official record reproduce what was intended - here is a school completed as contracted - North's photographs are of a truer result - here, in No.3, is an agreement that a hedge and chain is the only barrier needed between the public and private worlds, in a city that inexplicably exists.

In isolation, many of the Canberra suite and Canberra Coda images would appear quite ordinary, photographs of nothing in particular in a city once derided for being in perpetual search of its centre. It's easy to feel as if the true object worth photographing, in the documentary sense, is just outside of North's frame.

But together, the photographs evoke Canberra's suburban experience: frequently ordinary, and then also mythical for having been built at all.