A Thinking Street Photography Site
I’m still walking around…
The streets are exhibitions waiting to speak.
What would the stall say?
What’s he thinking about?
We’re all concealed by what we buy and sell.
We all buy and sell.
We’re all waiting.
Until it’s all meat…
Camera: Olympus XA2
Film: Ilford XP2 400
We can only occupy what’s central to our heart.
Love. Peace.
A way of life.
Reading a future into existence.
We seek the wisdom of the streets.
The streets will decide.
Who’s the butcher.
Who’s the meat.
Love the best we can.
Find peace the way we can.
And hope something beautiful comes.
We pray this is good enough.
The range of imagery in Hong Kong is breathtaking.
You look.
You think about things.
There’s a mental itch you can’t get to and a glimmer you’re aiming at.
When will Godot arrive? You look again.
At things we do.
At how we live.
Our ambitions.
The road not taken.
We have an apparatus for looking.
They look back.
This is something we look for.
Sincerity.
Attitude.
A kind of mental space.
We work and rework.
And hope everything comes together at the end.
Some images are available here as open-edition prints at my Saatchi Art page.
The overall theme for this post is Shanghai’s speed and mobility.
I realize I have a preference for a “flawed” aesthetic.
Even with a digital camera (Canon 600D), I’m still going for the same vision as with my film compacts.
In fact, in some ways, I’m treating my Canon 600D like a film compact…
If you view the image at full size, you could see the grain almost breaking up the picture.
There’s a symmetry to this composition that I like.
It’s not focused correctly, just as we see things in glimpses.
There’s still a lot of construction going on in Shanghai.
This is visual evidence that the metropolis (population 23 million) is still growing!
It’s a city on the move.
With people on the move.
The three big Chinese characters are translated literally as “China dream”.
A city is the dream of its people made manifest.
The Chinese characters on the left can roughly be translated as “caring for the youth of the future” … I think.
The ones on the top right means “building the nation’s most eminent city”.
Where would Shanghai (or China) be, economically and politically, in the next 5-10 years?
This is one of the entrances to the Xujiahui campus of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where I gave a talk entitled … lo and behold, “The Practice of Poetry and Street Photography” at a conference called Modern and Postmodern Arts: China and the World.
People pose here, at the campus gate, for photographs.
One of my favourite Chinese idioms – “a hundred years to cultivate a human being”.
The full idiom is something like “it takes ten years to cultivate a tree, a hundred to cultivate a human being”.
That’s a library, if i remember correctly.
Waiting.
Still waiting.
Now crossing – a nation of people on the move.
Places to go, people to see, things to do.
The next 8 photographs were taken by my son, though of course, I’m the one responsible for the high contrast monochrome.
The first six were taken when we were in one of the spheres of the Shanghai Oriental Pearl TV Tower.
The next two pictures (by my son) were taken at Urban Planning Exhibition Center.
I think he’s developing a good sense of composition here.
Thanks for dropping by, and buy my open edition prints at my Saatchi Art page!
Hong Kong Lucida 