A Thinking Street Photography Site
This is one of those grungy images that jumped out at me. I was on a double-decker bus and he was on an adjacent seat, looking out. I like the urbane, dreamy and defiant attitude. Definitely a Wong Kar-wai Chungking Express moment for me. In fact, the bus went past Chungking Mansions moments before I pulled out my camera.
That Nikon signage was a serendipitous element so crucial to street photography.
Oops – how time flies. I’ve been busy. Between June and August I’ve been to Glasgow to give a conference talk on poetry and photography at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, popped over to Edinburgh to visit the museums, came back to Hong Kong, back to Singapore, to HK, to SG and back to HK again.
So here’re 2 of my artist friends I’ve met in Glasgow – it was wonderful to be talking to them about the various paintings we saw at the Kelvingrove.
I simply love the street life in Glasgow and Edinburgh:
These were all shot with my trusty Yashica 35 GX.
I cannot help but be aware of my class consciousness even as I think on this image. He looks up, as if in hope, and the umbrella might shelter him from the harsh sunlight. Yet what has he to look forward to except a life among slightly decrepit buildings such as the one above him in the background? The tattoo of his left shoulder speaks of a defiance against a middle-class, executive presentation of the self. I can understand how such an image could be aestheticized, probably in a film by Wong Kar-wai.
Is this the only narrative I could conjure for him?
Sermon
Was it God I saw talking to his women,
holding a jug of wine?
I am reading Genesis, chapter five,
where Enoch walked and he was not,
for he was taken.
In this fever of Hong Kong
there are no hermits in caves,
no saints on mountain tops.
It is not easy to see with this fever,
and I am numb to my face,
all thumbs in my eyes.
Is it possible to believe
a beard and a light bulb?
Fingers on my throat,
I try not to dance in my sandals
to the hymn.
I am no mime artist.
I am not a Roman centurion.
I am no Caesar,
though I try not to add salt
to the wound.
I am waiting for a voice
to rip me open to the sky.
I am reading Genesis, chapter five,
where Enoch walked and he was not,
for he was taken.
Poem and photograph previously featured in Friends Newsletter. Hong Kong: Friends of the Art Museum, CUHK. Jan 2013 Issue.
The street is designated by the photographer. It is not the street scene that waits for the arrival of the photographer, but that the photographer designates the street as such.
Waiting
Waiting, for our train to stop or to start
a line, we want our clockwork poetry.
We want spreadsheets to write a smile
on a Chinese businessman’s face.
Surely there is a law against waiting too long:
we bow to the lesser gods.
On the station concourse, we exchange life
too quickly for a message on our phones.
Like me, you are a man limping
without a watch and a tie.
We need assurances of fortune cookies
out of the smelting factory of our days.
Sometimes I am tired like a tourist
eating popcorn in an amusement park.
We are snails out of a shell of countries –
can there be a Spirit like water from a stone?
My wallet is a short talisman against the hour –
is there a book waiting to be read?
Poem and photograph previously featured in Friends Newsletter. Hong Kong: Friends of the Art Museum, CUHK. Jan 2013 Issue.
We have been creating a scaffolding here, of which the centre is humankind. Or if this is too grandiose, perhaps we could say that the centre here is a self, a contingency of photography, language, and thought. We think we are building something here but what finally emerges is a self with whom we quarrel.
“What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms…” writes Nietzsche. What then is Hong Kong? Hong Kong, for now, is that person crossing the street.
Already there is a pattern to these photographs – the commonplace activities of walking and driving, roads and pavements, people on display – a city is united in pedestrian activities. I happened to be at Cheung Sha Wan on an errand to pick up bamboo noodles for my wife and I chanced upon this. I too am a pedestrian, albeit with a camera. What is that private epiphany here? In Camera Lucida, Barthes focused on memory, family, loss and grief. I am interested in production, action, and mobility of both thought and writing.
Groundwork
There is power in granite
of your choice,
earth-deposits of a history of money.
So today you are digging
out of the pavement a strength
you already possess,
a faith in stone.
I wonder what would happen
if you find a fish gasping in the dust,
or if a hundred-year-old turtle crawls out
to proclaim the good news.
I am waiting for a minotaur
to emerge to start a fresh flood.
We imagine ourselves to be trees
in the thick sulphur of this city
where no one needs to speak.
Maybe you’re waiting to tell a story
of an underground government
of broken bodies.
Who are our leaders,
that they would stay quiet?
These are eruptions
too deep in the ground,
metaphors of stone,
groundwork of hands.
Poem and photograph previously published in Friends Newsletter. Hong Kong: Friends of the Art Museum, CUHK. Jan 2013 Issue.
Hong Kong Lucida 