October 2013 – Hong Kong Lucida

MTR Moments

Posted on October 30, 2013March 10, 2014 by eddietay in Colour

I suppose these are not the most technically accomplished of photographs.

Yet there are times when technicality takes a backseat – you could have a technically perfect photograph that is meaningless.

Here, we’re reminded of how street photography is an art that requires a seat-of-the-pants attitude. Sometimes it’s about serendipity and stealth and being “in the zone”.

There’s not much to say about the composition in the above photograph.

Perhaps I’m forgiving myself too much, yet the imperfection says something of the constraints of the art in the particular environment.

I simply can’t really walk around and compose my shots in a train cabin as it would attract too much attention.

In any case, the cabin was crowded. Most of these people were about 1-2 metres away from me.

This person saw me without really registering what I was doing and turned away.

This person was too engrossed in his reading to notice.

It’s amazing how we switch off when we’re commuting.

Yet I find these moments, moments when we’re lost in our thoughts, the most poignant of all.

I didn’t think the above would work at first. I was thinking to myself at that moment that this was a wasted exposure.

I’m biased, of course, but now I think I’d rather like the artlessness of the composition.

Again, not perfect. It’s not sharp enough.

At times like this, I take comfort in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s statement that “people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing” (The Mind’s Eye, p. 38).

Thanks for coming by today.

The Art of Life

Posted on October 24, 2013March 10, 2014 by eddietay in Monochrome

I’m planning to use the following quote for a talk on poetry and photography for fellow writers.

It’s from Zygmunt Bauman, a sociologist who has written on what he calls “liquid modernity”. This passage from his book The Art of Life is relevant to those who are on the quest for meaning:

To practise the art of life, to make one’s life a “work of art”, amounts … to being in a state of permanent transformation, to perpetually self-redefine through becoming … someone other than one has been thus far. (The Art of Life 73)

I now have the habit of bringing along one or two film cameras wherever I go. It’s usually a Leica M6, paired with either a Yashica GX, Canonet QL 17 Giii or more recently, the Olympus XA2.

The Olympus XA2 is really stealthy because of zone-focusing. And it’s really quiet too. For example, I could do this in a cab without the driver noticing:

Try that with a Canon 5D Mark III.

Part of my fascination with film cameras has to do with their longevity – digital cameras either go out of fashion or break down after 3-5 years (though it has to be said that my Canon G11 is still going strong). The Olympus XA2 was made in the 1980s, which means the thing in my hand is about 30 years old.

I guess I am now using my cameras as a sketchbook of sorts, storing material for writing and thinking. This is probably a little too deliberate, but I think of this as pushing myself beyond what I am, “becoming someone other than one has been thus far”, asking street photography to teach me to be a better writer and thinker.

For now, the art of life for me is about storing moments which might otherwise seem artless.

Lately, I have begun to take pictures with only my eyes, imagining what a scene would look like on a photograph… click… click…

And I like this quote from William Todd Schultz, who wrote An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus, a wonderful psychobiography of Arbus:

Artists aren’t always in complete command of their material. Sometimes it commands them and they let it; they get out of the way, the subject matter comes unbidden, it compels them and they follow its lead.

This might be a careless comparison, but Arbus is to photography what Sylvia Plath is to poetry.

And as for material for the street photographer, there’s often poetry to be found in places you least expect, which is why that tiny Olympus XA2 is so handy:

The above is just next to where I live, a plot of land on which a small shopping mall is being built. *sigh*

I’m always fascinated by how one could be in a built-up area in Hong Kong, and after walking for 20 minutes, be in the midst of idyllic village houses where clothes are hung in open air and kitchens are next to public walkways:

And then, 10 minutes later, one is at the beach.

And you would come across scenes like this:

This is Wu Kai Sha beach, and there’re now plans for land reclamation in the area which would mean the beach would be no more… *another sigh*

Thanks for reading.

Street Market and Printing

Posted on October 17, 2013March 10, 2014 by eddietay in Colour

Though all the images here are created with film cameras, they are of course scanned from negatives and ultimately, on display here are digitised images on a computer monitor.

I’ve been experimenting with colours lately, having bought a dedicated pigment ink photo printer and various Ilford and Harman papers.

It really does make a difference whether the image is printed on glossy or on matte, etc. And of course, I am going to frame them up, now that I’ve finally gotten my hands on photo-safe tape.

Images like the one below work on both matte and gloss. On matte, there is a gritty look which fits in with the grungy seat-of-the-pants attitude of street photography.

A colleague who used to paint commented that the matte print looks more like a painting than a photograph. He said there’s a Caravaggio framed-by-darkness quality to it.

On the other hand, the glossy print has what I think of as a “Nirvana in Carnegie Hall” effect… a refined “fine art” treatment to street photography.

I suppose glossy is good for portraying drama in ordinary scenes.

And now that I’ve got all of these, I’m now thinking of what I should do next. Where is this taking me?

Direction 1: Teaching and Research

A fascination with photography (and film cameras, I must admit) is now changing the way I work. I find myself making connections between photography and creative writing, between the history of art and literary history. Is there a homology between creative writers and photographers?

What would a university course on the connections between photography and literature look like?

I am now thinking of creating a course that is practice-based, one that encourages students to go out and explore HK culture using literary and non-literary writing and photography, and getting them to think about what constitutes valuable cultural knowledge.

I’ll probably throw social media (such as a WordPress blog like this) into the mix, getting them to think about the use of social media for sharing one’s work. And what is meant by “sharing”? What, really, is being shared? And what is “work”?

Direction 2:

This has all to do with the situation of one’s work, I suppose. Digital images live in one’s hard disks or are displayed on sites like this. Now that I have the physical prints on hand, perhaps the next step is to work towards a gallery exhibition.

It’s a kind of curating, I suppose, setting up one’s work for viewing …

What kind of logistics and various other considerations would this involve? There’s a learning curve ahead of me …

What is becoming clear to me now though, is that this blog is like a thinking-in-progress technology, a depository of raw ideas… much like a building under construction …

Thanks for reading.

Monochrome Poetry

Posted on October 9, 2013March 10, 2014 by eddietay in Monochrome

Photography is … visual. That much is obvious. As a published poet and literature professor, I’m supposed to be able to convey ideas with words but what happens when something is a visual idea?

This would take us from visual to verbal to visual again. And the first and last visual may not be the same, even though we’re talking about the same photograph.

I look and look and understand how a photograph works, but I’ve yet to properly learn how to say why it works and why I enjoy it.

Photography has made me rethink some of those things to do with literature that I’ve forgotten. Of course, the experience of a literary work is not the same thing as a book review or a scholarly paper.

The experience … the experience … the horror … the horror … the “oomph” … it starts with the experience, and sometimes I feel like all one has to do is to read and look and be quiet. That was the experience of reading in my youth which put me on the path of academia.

The subjective “oomph” comes first. All the bits about literary/intellectual history, the meaning of meaning and so on, comes after.

This explains why my colleagues down the corridor could spend so much time on books that I genuinely find boring and pointless … and of course, vice versa.

Anyway, back to what is visual “oomph”, at least for me:

That’s the Leisure and Cultural Services Headquarters at Shatin. Perhaps this is what the Ministry of Truth looks like in Orwell’s 1984.

The mini-bus and high-rise apartment buildings. So very Hong Kong. This is at the elevated bus interchange just outside New Town Plaza, the hard-to-miss shopping mecca at Shatin.

Walk down the sloped pavement by the side onto ground level and you’ll see an entire length of village houses, some of which have been converted into eateries.

That’s just below the bus interchange, right next to more mini-bus terminal stops. I like the different greys of the pavement…

Yet another village house … with a gothic feel.

All these images are taken from within 200-300 metres. That’s how packed Hong Kong is. Keep in mind this is the urbanised area of the New Territories, third in line in terms of urban development, coming after the Kowloon/Tsim Sha Tsui areas and the Central/Wanchai areas on Hong Kong Island.

Thanks for reading.

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