A Thinking Street Photography Site
Lots of street shots to do with construction workers.
Quite literally, these are the people who built Singapore.
I grew up in Singapore, and even to me, the heat is too much at times.
So yes, this is hard work.
These were taken at various places.
The scenes are ubiquitous.
Singapore depends a lot on foreign labour.
Working behind the scenes.
So we have these.
Camera: Olympus XA 2
Film: Agfa Vista 400
We need to avoid doing the same thing and look out for or even create the next paradigm shift.
We need to think about how we can add value to our work.
It’s all about win-win.
What’s our ROI on this?
We need to think outside the box here.
This is inevitable – it’s because of creative destruction.
We need to synergize our mission and vision.
Let’s pluck the low-hanging fruit for now and circle back to this discussion later.
Camera: Contax TVS II
Film: Kodak BW400CN
Singapore is a work in progress, and the physical landscape never fails to remind you of this.
There could be cranes in the sky in built-up areas, and there could be views like the one below.
Occasionally, it gets a bit postmodern, like this:
The inside wants to be outside.
Our desires/appetites/wants/needs are very well structured and catered to.
Everything is for sale.
Cities are places where appetites are met.
Appetites transcend national boundaries …
Pig organ soup, anyone? It’s actually quite yummy.
Waiting.
Doing.
Working.
Cooking.
Buildings are structures of desires.
There’s ambition in the architecture.
These are homely desires.
There’s an architecture of modernity.
An architecture of nationhood.
And space in which we simply do nothing at all.
Thanks for reading!
Open-edition prints are available at my Saatchi Art page.
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.
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.
Hong Kong Lucida 