A Thinking Street Photography Site
Again we choose.
We decide.
We look.
Hmm…
That one! Yes!
This is the season.
We’re in season.
We stop to think.
And buy wisely.
All images are taken with my stealthy Contax TVS II with Ferrania Solaris 400 film.
For collectors: some images here are available as open edition affordable prints at my Saatchi Art page.
Thanks for reading!
So many to choose from!
We follow our appetites.
We make the effort.
We are exasperated.
We lose ourselves.
Oh yes! A real decision!
We have the luxury of time.
We calculate.
We choose again.
All images here are from my trusty Minolta AF-C, loaded with Kodak Professional BW400CN film.
Some images from this post are available as affordable open edition prints at my Saatchi Art page for collectors.
Do drop by to have a look.
Every day, we do the same thing.
We wait.
We’re waiting for something to happen.
Or for someone to come along to give us the answer.
We wait for that big transcendental Other, that Godot, to come along.
We have a choice, we think.
We choose.
We consult.
And hope for the best.
And then we eat.
And after all that, we’ll be merry.
For collectors: some images from this post are available as open edition prints.
I usually do very little post-editing, leaving the quality of the film to sort itself out.
But the colours can turn out to be so very different from one exposure to another.
All images here are done with my Contax TVS, with Fuji Superia Venus 800.
The above looks so lomography-ish.
I suppose lomography is point-and-shoot film photography write large.
Then you have this, which seems a bit warm.
And then this:
Greens and blues are rather saturated, with a gritty look to them.
I waited a bit for the green canvas to be spread out, and was spotted.
So I smiled and waved, trying very hard to look like a silly tourist befuddled by his camera.
Oh look – yummy lychees!
And here, the colours are muted.
I was hoping for a silhouette effect.
And then I switched off my camera, turned it on again, and forgot to de-activate the auto-flash function.
The flash went off less than 2 metres from him. He looked at my camera, and didn’t react…
I figured he must be deep in thought, or was he looking at something else…
For collectors: open edition prints from this post are available here.
These are images taken with the same camera (Minolta AF-C), with a single roll (Fuji Neopan 400CN), over a week or two.
There’re just so many environments, and so many stories waiting to be told.
There’s the early riser.
The joy of a youthful busker.
The necessities of life: public laundry.
There’s discipline and teamwork.
Political consciousness.
Work.
And work.
(For collectors: open edition prints from this post are available here.)
I do have a routine, and go to the same few places time and again.
These are all taken within a week or so on the same roll of film, with my Minolta AF-C loaded with Kodak ColorPlus 200.
My usual haunts are Shamshuipo and Wu Kai Sha beach.
That’s a cooking stove by a village house along Wu Kai Sha beach.
They say the best camera is the one you have with you.
I have cult rangefinders such as the Canonet QL 17 GIII, Yashica GX and the Leica M6.
But nowadays I’m in a point-and-shoot and snapshot-aesthetics phase.
So it’s either a Contax TVS, Olympus XA2, or Minolta AF-C.
These are to me signs of life, these ropes and bricks, arranged as if for display.
Sometimes, I strike up a conversation with people with my broken Cantonese.
This gentleman runs a BBQ site at Wu Kai Sha beach. He was trying to convince me to book a BBQ pit for my family for the coming weekend and as a bonus, he would throw in a few complimentary pieces of cuttlefish.
At Shamshuipo. That’s one of my favorite pit stop. Whenever I walk past, I’d try to take a shot.
It seems we oscillate between desire and labour all the time.
We discipline ourselves to make sure the plumbing works.
I am reading Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew B. Crawford.
It’s a meditation on the value of manual work. I’m on page 79 at this point and it’s one of those books I’d like to read slowly, because there are so many wonderful insights that are conveyed in a very accessible manner which encourage me to stop and just think.
Take this sentence for example:
If different human types are attracted to different kinds of work, the converse is also true: the work a man does forms him.
I am a literature geek, pure and simple. That says a lot about who I am already. Neat, simple and a bit obsessive.
So I have chosen the kind of work that suits my temperament.
The work then further deepens my temperament.
I am sure many of us could say the same thing.
But I’m at a point where something else has come into play – my interest in street photography using quality compact film cameras.
Street photography relies on serendipity. It celebrates ordinary, everyday life, and it’s something to think about as to keep myself from going insane during banal moments (such as when I am at the back of a really long queue at a crowded supermarket checkout.)
And it introduces a kind of variety into my work I suppose. (The Chinese characters at this shop entrance means “anarchy”.)
I was standing outside the shop composing with my Contax TVS and a passerby saw what I was doing.
“All these crazy shops,” he muttered to me, and walked on. It looks like a Japanese ramen place as far as I could figure.
So, yes, I suppose it’s a little bit different from my day job. Here, I’m standing at the entrance, aiming my camera, waiting deliberately for the right moment.
What am I doing, and what am I looking for as a street photographer? I admit I live within myself too much.
Maybe part of the work of street photography has to do with getting away from myself.
Sometimes, it’s good not to be myself.
I look into the backs of trucks.
I look at other people at work.
I look at stuff.
I am intrigued by the strangeness of other people.
I imagine myself wearing their clothes. Then, I imagine myself wearing their skin.
And I look some more, and am sometimes not quite used to what I see.
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.
The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. (“The Metropolis and Mental Life” p. 409)
All quotations here are taken from Georg Simmel (from The Sociology of George Simmel, translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff, The Free Press, 1950), whose writings I dip into once in a while because it’s still so potent as a commentary on how modern city life affects the way we think and feel. We don’t see these effects, just as a fish fails to see the water it swims in.
Modern mind has become more and more calculating. The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world into an arithmetic problem, to fix every part of the world by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones. (“The Metropolis and Mental Life” p.412)
I guess the vulgar word for me is “positivism” – the idea that it is possible to come up with consistent and reliable formulas to how life works. Formulas are re-assuring, such as “be a banker/lawyer/accountant/doctor, because these jobs translate into big numbers, and these big numbers mean success”.
Of course, there are many successful bankers/lawyers/accountants/doctors who lead meaningful lives and who enjoy their jobs. I’m only arguing against the confusion between quality and quantity. Quality cannot be easily quantified. Sometimes we play this soundtrack too readily.
Here in buildings and educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technology, in the formations of community life, and in the visible institutions of the state, is offered such an overwhelming fullness of crystallized and impersonalized spirit that the personality, so to speak, cannot maintain itself under its impact. On the one hand, life is made infinitely easy for the personality in that stimulations, interests, uses of time and consciousness are offered to it from all sides. They carry the person as if in a stream, and one needs hardly to swim for oneself. On the other hand, however, life is composed more and more of these impersonal contents and offerings which tend to displace the genuine personal colorations and incomparabilities. This results in the individual’s summoning the utmost in uniqueness and particularization, in order to preserve his most personal core. He has to exaggerate this personal element in order to remain audible even to himself. (“The Metropolis and Mental Life” p. 422)
I’ve always found the above passage to be rather depressing. The modern concern with the uniqueness of our personality emerges out of an anxiety. Now that everything is for sale, we’re compelled to be “unique”, “autonomous” and “individual” so as to differentiate ourselves from other cogs in the giant capitalist machine. “Look at me I’m so unique and interesting,” I tell myself and others, knowing that there are tens of thousands of people around me (and many with blogs like this) saying precisely the same thing.
We are surrounded by things we buy with numbers. And these things, whether tangible or intangible, which we buy and sell, turn us into who we are.
Is it possible to walk away from such a situation?
In a previous post on the snapshot aesthetic, I mentioned zone focusing with Olympus XA2 and auto-focusing with Minolta AF-C.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, behold my Contax TVS. It has an aperture priority mode and a program mode. There’s auto-focus (which you could override with a dial).
This allows me to be more stealthy, and the motorized whirring is not too loud.
I consider the Contax TVS series to be the baby brother of the Contax T1/2/3 series of which T2 is much celebrated, or the Contax G series of cameras.
It has the Vario Sonnar lens which allows for zooming, for days when I’m too lazy to zoom with my feet.
This lady popped out and I responded quickly enough…
“Oops, what’s this?” I thought as I was looking at the negative.
The panoramic mode was activated without me knowing.
Oh oh …
Hm.
The panoramic mode is basically a cropping of the frame by the camera, and the panels were unhinged.
I felt there was an intuitive bond between me and the Contax TVS… was I imagining things?
It’s built like a tank, and I could take myself seriously when I’m holding it… I was so looking forward to serious days…
After a moment of reflection and in that rare moment of sanity, I returned the camera to the store.
There were 2 Nikon 35Ti‘s beckoning, and a Fuji “sardine can” Tiara as well.
It was then that I had a Prufrockian moment:
Do I dare disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
I waved goodbye (in my mind only) to those cameras.
The person at the store kept my number, noted my mournful expression, and 3 days later, I was told there’s another Contax TVS in the store, this one with the original strap, manual (in Japanese), case and lens cap.
I took it out for a spin.
Woohoo!
The panoramic mode here was fully intended. This was the only panoramic shot I took. I don’t expect to use it much. It’s a bit tacky I think…
Happy happy joy joy.
All is fine – I tilted the camera and shook it this way and that to see if the panoramic mode would kick in.
I zoomed in and out and it’s fine.
Zooming in … and it’s still ok.
Yup, we have a winner here.
The Force is strong with this one…
O happy day!
Hong Kong Lucida 