A Thinking Street Photography Site
There’s no method to this madness called street photography.
At Trafalgar Square: a straightforward shot.
We’re all distracted people.
Admiring Cezanne at the National Gallery.
Consuming Monet.
Blurry man against blurry painting.
Around the Bloomsbury area – the lines “made sense” to me.
A busy shot at the Covent Garden Market.
T-shirts!
Time for a sip.
Thanks for reading!
Camera: Canon 600D
Lens: Canon 40mm f/2.8 STM
Here’s a mishmash of images of Singapore, significant to myself.
Though the underlying theme here is about how we try to snatch something beautiful out of what is essentially functional.
Form follows function in much of Singapore.
Life, too, follows function: poetry is a luxury we cannot afford.
There is one way only. The rest is barred.
If you live with it long enough, it becomes beautiful.
Draw the curtains.
Poetry delayed is poetry denied.
We are at the zoo.
The helpful tram driver and a passenger.
After the animal show – poetry is found after the event.
Reflections in the MRT.
The tree is obedient, bent in the wind.
Perhaps something is poetry after all…
Thanks for reading.
Camera: Leica M6
Lens: Voigtlander 35mm f 1.4 Nokton SC
Film: Ilford XP2
I’ve lived in Hong Kong long enough such that I could see Singapore with a fresh set of eyes.
Some of the buildings have become rather futuristic.
And public housing flats are beginning to look very homely.
Singapore is home, a comfortable grid.
We’re all fitted into grids.
Nice looking public housing.
Was at Hard Rock Café with my family.
An amazing acoustic set – it’s nice to listen to local acts with my wife… while trying to get our children to eat their broccoli.
The HRC I know were Saturday clubbing nights, 2 decades ago.
As I looked around at the various tables, I saw expat families with kids, tourists and middle-class locals out for dinner.
Times have changed – or perhaps I have changed.
Once upon a time, I wanted to be a rock star with my acoustic guitar.
The lyric he’s singing: “I’m all about that bass, about that bass, about that bass…”
Subsequent serious research (Google and Wikipedia) tells me it’s really a very cool song.
Now, I see HRC as an F&B outlet using rock music as a marketing tool, reaching out to customers like me who’ve come of age with the likes of GnR, Bon Jovi and Skid Row.
Perhaps I’m getting older and more cynical.
Still – it’s good to be young and idealistic.
HRC still looks impressive.
The colour is wonderful.
Orchard Road is gearing up for Christmas.
Hilton façade with a dash of nature.
A Martian landscape in full colour.
Equally interesting in monochrome.
It’s nice to be young…
An empty bus looks somewhat disturbing, like an unfulfilled promise.
This looks better – all blurry and full of promise.
Thanks for reading!
Camera: Canon 600D
Legacy Lens: Meyer-Optik Gorlitz Lydith 30mm f. 3.5
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.
Various scenes in Singapore – some iconic, others a little whimsical.
Singapore the Garden City.
Executives waiting for a bus. This was taken while I was in a bus.
For the love of country.
Country loving fashion.
Looking up.
He posed for me.
The above and below few images are of workers who are maintaining a playground.
They saw what I was doing, smiled, and gamely went on with their work.
They were very thorough.
They were tightening all the screws.
And checking to see if everything is in order.
That’s a chicken rice stall – the kind of food I go for whenever I am in Singapore.
This is part of the everyday Singaporean culture often take for granted.
A sack of something on the pavement.
It makes for a wonderful art installation idea.
Barrier – though I wonder what the triangular cut-outs are for.
The durian.
Lamp shade.
That’s a partial rendering of the Marina Bay Sands, a tourist destination.
It reminds me of a Star Trek phaser.
Rooftop facade of the Esplanade – also known as the durian.
Swissotel the Stamford, designed by I.M. Pei.
A construction worker taking a break at a public housing void deck.
For collectors: open-edition prints are available here.
I suppose this theme is like a visual fixation for me.
This post is dedicated to those who know what it feels like to be doing street photography in your own neighbourhood.
In our own ways, we’re all searching for something, using our cameras as visual search engines.
What are we looking for? For another way to look, to turn everything into a work of art…
I suppose it’s about moments that surprise me.
That tree now looks like an explosion with the HDB flat facade as backdrop…
I keep coming back to HDB flats (public housing that 80-85% of Singaporeans live in), because it’s the cookie-cutter, middle-class, ideological environment I grew up in and which is part of who I am.
For those looking for general info concerning public housing in Singapore, this article from Wikipedia is a good general source. You could purchase these (highly-subsidised) flats through various schemes which are generally pro-marriage, pro-family, pro-heteronormative, etc.
It’s all very Bauhaus-influenced, with a rational/functional ethos to it.
Chua Beng-Huat, a sociologist at NUS, has a wonderful book called Political Legitimacy and Housing: Singapore’s Stakeholder Society. It looks at the ideological and social-engineering aspect of Singapore’s public housing policy.
I’m fascinated by how newness can emerge from familiar/regimental environments.
I have a thing with hawker centre food …
These are some people I’m learning to see again with my camera.
These were all taken on the same day I was due to go back to Hong Kong.
At the airport … back to Hong Kong…
Is Hong Kong any different?
In the end, it’s all about finding your place, moving up or down…
I should say all of images here are from the same roll of film: Ilford XP2 in an Olympus XA2.
The Leica M6 is now my back up camera (!!!)
Thanks for reading!
Hong Kong Lucida 