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
Shamshuipo, as you can see, is my other haunt.
There’s enough bustle for street photographs.
The colours can be interesting too. The red and green combo is nice.
He didn’t even notice me.
In contemplation.
I was testing out a generic rectangular lens hood on my lens to make sure there wasn’t any vignetting.
This is one of two flea market stalls selling film cameras.
It’s a low volume high flow business. The offerings change every week.
Occasionally, you could see a few Leicas. I saw an X Pro 1 here once…
Thanks for reading!
Camera: Canon 600D
Legacy Lens: SMC Takumar 35mm f 3.5
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 were at a wet market in Yuen Long.
I walked past this shed and felt I really had to take a shot.
If you’re in construction, you have to be a bit of a Spiderman.
They’re very agile.
Chicken rice stall.
We walked through a wet market.
Straw hats for sale.
Very fried and oily calamari (or were they oysters)?
I thought the wall was rather beautiful.
I was having a William Eggleston moment here.
The second floor of a village house.
Dried seafood.
More dried seafood.
Some more dried seafood.
Dried seafood, anyone?
Last chance to buy dried seafood!
Scaffoldings offer lots of compositional possibilities.
I walked around to obtain different angles.
I have so many others but I’ll stop here.
The underside of awnings too, can be beautiful.
Check out the lines, colours and shadows.
Sometimes the most common of things can offer up beauty.
The blue and yellow above go very well together.
The arm offers a quirky variation to the scene.
Bamboo scaffolding.
Some more scaffolding.
Parking lot signage.
Thanks for reading!
All photographs here were taken with the now classic Canon G11.
Heartland is the title of a novel by Daren Shiau.
We don’t meet often, though our paths have crossed a few times at various literary readings/events.
The novel is about the coming of age of a young man who grapples with class disparities, national service (conscription) and romance.
It is also about every Singaporean son…
The heartland is the social-cultural space we grew up in.
For me, it’s what nostalgia is made of.
There is a shiny global Singapore (Gardens by the Bay, Marina Sands, Clarke Quay, etc.), and there’s also the heartland of Singapore we return to in the evenings.
It’s the uncle we see every day, loitering at the void deck.
It’s hawker food!
It’s that uncle on a bicycle I side-stepped to avoid in the morning.
All of that adds up to a sense of community…
And both national and personal growth is a kind of departure, a severing of ties from the past…
We’ll never return to the seesaw of our childhoods again.
Things are too new to be comfortable.
All that unearthing and shifting of foundations…
There’s always work in progress.
Hence all we can do is learn to look back and find a glimmer of our home again in our imagination…
For collectors: open-edition prints are available at my Saatchi Art page.
Thanks for reading!
Here’s where things go to die.
We have a guardian of sorts.
The day is green.
Or deathly pink.
The remains of the day.
There’s a time to build.
A time to tear down.
A time to conserve.
A time to say goodbye to the little world.
And a time to prepare.
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.
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 