A Thinking Street Photography Site
Mention Hong Kong and you would think of skyscrapers, crowded streets, and the wonderful dimsum.
But there’s a quieter, meditative side to Hong Kong as well.
You could find scenes like these…
These are the views you get if you’re willing to live in somewhat out-of-the-way village houses.
These are really quiet, meditative spots.
If you’re willing to live near a farm…
And this, too, is an environment where we could live with ourselves…
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But there is also another pace of life which you can see on weekends.
You’ll see people cycling, fishing and taking leisurely walks.
There are fast-paced days and there are slow-paced days.
Today, we’ll go slow.
This entry is about cycling with my son, without photographs of us cycling.
You can see our bikes in the background though.
At moments like this, we slip into another time. You’ll see people enjoying being alone, in their own space-time bubbles.
This is the bike shop we go to when there’s something to the bikes I can’t fix. They’re really friendly and will actually tell me I don’t need that pair of fancy bike gloves when a generic one would do as well.
My cynical self would think about the way they are setting up their profit margins. But they sometimes do minor repairs and maintenance for free as well.
The boss will just tell you it’s free of charge and please buy your next bicycle from him.
She was shielding her eyes from the sun, so naturally I brought my camera to my eye.
That’s at the end of Wu Kai Sha beach. You’ll see quite a number of village houses.
An open door.
You could see the contrast between village life and high rise living here.
Hong Kong is a city of sharp juxtapositions.
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Sometimes things get slightly pink and orange with a dash of metallic red …
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*
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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.
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Night photography poses a challenge for any photographer.
Even with a digital camera, you’ll need a wide aperture, longer exposures, perhaps a tripod, or image stabilization if you’re doing it handheld, and you’ll need to have a high ISO setting.
Auto-focus might be a problem if it gets too dark, as a digital camera may not be able to find a focal point quickly enough.
So if you’re a street photographer with a film rangefinder loaded with Ilford XP2 at ISO 400, the odds are somewhat stacked against you at night. This is one of those times when you wish you’d caved in and bought that Fuji X100s.
A street market at night, as it happens, is one of those wonderful scenarios where everything comes together.
As the light bulbs are bright, you’ll have natural vignetting. The goods might have been arranged to form a perfect frame within a frame.
The stall hawkers, even when they spot you, would be too preoccupied with selling their wares to their customers, while the customers’ attention would be on those wares.
This person did spot me…
Oh well … and to challenge myself, this:
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I’m now convinced that Hong Kong is a street photographer’s paradise.
I’ve been paying attention to grids, lines and colours and it seems to me that all I have to do is wait a little bit and the composition would fall into place after a while.
Mongkok is rather good for that sort of thing.
For example, the rectangular green grids of this candy store window has a lomography edge to it, and all I had to do was to memorise where the framelines of my beloved Leica M6 would be and wait until someone walks into the frame. Check out the reflections and the Chinese characters – they’re there and yet not so overwhelming:
The diagonal lines were calling out to me as I was on a bridge:
And finally, I like the grungy and yet contemplative mood this evokes:
And I’m keeping a close watch on my diminishing supply of Kodak Portra 400 film with which these were taken…
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I don’t usually do color photography as I find it hard to “coordinate” the colors alongside the action in the frame. But the environment in this case seems to call out for it.
This was the beginning of a trip to Festival Walk, a shopping mall. My son wanted to pick up a few books at Page One. We sat at the front of a mini-bus.
For those not familiar with Hong Kong: Festival Walk is a gigantic shopping mall with a skating rink and cinema. I often got lost the first few times I was here.
There are so many escalators and reflective surfaces. There is a fun house mirror effect every time we are on the escalators:
We forget which way is up and which way is down…
I think this is the point, that the design of malls are slightly disorienting so that the shopping experience feels slightly unreal. Our ability at making rational choices are somewhat incapacitated – we lose track of time and spend more than we had originally intended.
I am reminded of a hotel called “Lotus Casino” in The Titan’s Curse, a novel in the Percy Jackson series, in which the characters were trapped. They were reluctant to leave the hotel because it was so fun. (The environment of casinos, of course, are meant to be unreal so that the chips [money] you’re losing look inconsequential anyway because you are just playing a game of Monopoly.) I’m thinking of those casinos in Macau now, especially the Greek Mythology Casino, complete with a gigantic statue of Zeus…
Here, the literary scholar in me is reminded of Fredric Jameson’s discussion of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, about how the postmodern architecture is tied in with the (totalitarian?) logic of late capitalism.
It’s so easy in the mall. We look and point and buy:
Everything is on show and so very photogenic, and the unreal becomes part of the experienced reality we consume and hence take for real:
I almost forgot to leave.
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.
Hong Kong Lucida 