Foreigners

The topic this time was 'Foreigners' with the particular proviso that we could only use a mobile phone camera. In my job I take pictures of fellow foreigners very often so I wanted to try something different. I also wanted to subvert the camera-phone limitations.

I went to the harbour and decided to shoot some harbour landscapes, for which a camera-phone is about the worst tool. It's obviously very common for tourists to take photos of themselves at the harbour with their phones and I wanted to play with this idea. I decided to take many shots in different light and stitch them together in Photoshop to give a feeling of the multitude of images that tourists shoot of Hong Kong harbour but out of these very common shots produce something visually interesting. I used transparency to keep the feeling of multiple images and to give the composition a rhythm.

In the style of Walker Evans

Our first assignment was to shoot in the style of Walker Evans. I had to go to West Kowloon for my Environmental Studies project so I did some shooting whilst I was over there.

We chatted to some old ladies who lived in Tai Kok Tsui in the little square of streets that jut out into the construction area for what will be the new West Kowloon Cultural District. This is the area where the Johnnie To film 'Breaking News' was shot. The ladies told us that where they were sitting used to be next to the ferry pier before the reclamation work. At that time the area was lively with many people coming and going, many hawkers and dai pai dongs selling fresh seafood etc. but now the area has died. They missed the life of the district and missed the sea view, which has been replaced by a construction site and new developments but didn't want to move because this was where they had always lived and where their friends were.

They feel that the government just does what it wants and doesn't take their views into account. They just hope that there will be somewhere for them to sit and talk in the new development.