A Thinking Street Photography Site
Again at Sham Shui Po.
Life follows function.
The buildings are useful for nostalgia.
Though they’re still here.
Bodies crammed between buildings.
A selection of goods.
At the butcher’s.
Chinese foodstuff.
Frenetic energy.
Bustle.
Check out the lap cheong (Chinese dried sausages)!
Yummy.
A window reflects.
Work in progress.
Still building.
Renewal and construction.
A tree trunk is tamed.
Shroud on building.
A conference.
A building pushes.
Camera: Canon 600D
Legacy Lens: SMC Takumar 35mm f 3.5
We went to the Power Station of Art, and I happily brought my 600D with my nifty-fifty lens along do a a bit of indoors street photography.
He’s either an artist or a priest…
A photograph of a person taking a photograph… that’s the master trope of this post.
I am looking at people who are looking at art.
Perhaps a case can be made that I am also making art of my own, out of art itself.
This is art quoting art.
Fabric mirroring fabric…
Museum goers are also performing a kind of art…
Someone doesn’t like Dickens… or perhaps this is a comment on China…
Don’t ask me what it means…
See for yourself.
And have a dialogue.
Hmm…
Hmm…
Hmm…
The gift shop is tastefully done.
The helicopter view of the gift shop.
The real is a shadow … the pose is clear.
Participatory art… we like to see ourselves in art.
Is art real?
Always read what it says…
An owl of Minerva…
So many texts and subtexts…
The elephant in the room…
Even the pipes look arty!
Is this art?
Can this be art?
Better consult the catalogues…
Is it in the book?
We need to do some close reading.
There’s a decorum here, for the sake of the decor…
We need to find out more…
Look some more…
Pay close attention.
Look up…
Look down at the screen.
The answer is in the smartphone.
Thanks for dropping by, and don’t forget to check out my Saatchi Art page!
For the images here, I’ve done a B/W conversion from Fuji Venus 800 film loaded on Olympus XA2.
I’ve done a minimal bit of tweaking for some high contrast.
To my eyes, they look somewhat raw and harassed.
Here’s another one of Luohu Commercial City, viewed at a lower level.
You could see this is a popular place for bargains.
The above composition looks quirky – though it looks strangely apt.
This is how we see things – artlessly.
I’m up close, and they’re too busy negotiating prices to notice.
Why is it that yummy food is always unhealthy food?
That’s the way we see things sometimes – blurred and hurried.
You could see I lingered for a bit at this stall…
Check out those food on the skewers …
And yes, let’s not forget the man who winked at my wife…
Some images from this post are available here as affordable prints, in case you haven’t checked out my Saatchi Art page yet.
If you’ve read the previous 3 posts, you’ll know that the photographs below were in some of those posts, though they are in color here.
Yes, my B mode (berserk mode) in the cable car.
Monochrome is a gift to the street photographer, because:
i) it removes distracting elements and focuses our attention on the theme and/or graphic elements such as lines/grids/repetitions;
ii) it provokes a knee-jerk reaction to do with aesthetic pretensions (ooh b/w, therefore it must be seriously worthy/arty/historical/documentary);
iii) there’s virtue in taking the minimalist less-is-more approach.
But sometimes, less can be less as well.
Slightly contrasty colors can be striking.
Here’re the cable car exhibits (which my wife said looked like Ultraman heads).
While we’re on the subject of superheroes, it’s hard to resist that Superman blue and red combo.
Blue and red combo again.
Slightly desaturated colors can be … poetic.
Colors could mark our different kinds of spaces.
Colorful below, black and white above.
There’s a statement here to be made about human colors vs religious monochrome.
The colors below look Kodak Ultramax -ish to me.
Anyway, there’s a tussle here of course, and you could say the photograph in color is not the same as the one in monochrome.
This one below looks Kodak Portra – ish. (Yes, yes, I miss my film cameras already.)
Of course, there are various kinds of monochrome (low vs high contrast, different filters, etc.).
Not to mention b/w vs colors as in film photography.
Photography is a universe in itself.
Until next time.
We’re still at Noah’s Ark.
Though this time, in contrast to my previous post, I figure I’ll go the monochrome high contrast way just to see the difference.
Did I mention there was a beach next to Noah’s Ark?
So we have a couple posing for wedding photographs, quite oblivious to the sun-bather who is enjoying the view.
The humor is gone from the photograph… instead it’s a kind of existential commentary on human aspiration…
A reflection on the ups and downs of everyday life…
For some reason the same photograph in high contrast monochrome looks grittier …
There’s plenty to keep the kids busy. Educational too.
The Last Supper.
The Last Supper, with the kids in front and gallery guide behind.
The giraffe looks overextended.
Park attendants sorting things out.
From behind a popcorn and bbq stand.
The village house is still beautiful.
Time to relax.
Thanks for reading!
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.
Hong Kong Lucida 