Visions libres Magazine/Inside Abandoned

Life in Hong Kong has been at times challenging for me. It is a very fast paced city and like many big cities it’s not a very friendly place at times. It hasn’t been an easy journey for me to adapt to life here as my nature is quite mellow and introverted. It is also very status driven and within the ‘expat bubble’ people can seem to lose a sense of reality and live quite a spoilt life as if they are more superior. (This doesn’t apply to all expats of course and I have made some great, down to earth friends here they just took a while to find!) So I mostly feel like I don’t fit in either to the local HK culture or to the majority of the expat world. I always feel like I am just the on looker from the surface and that I don’t really belong, but I quite like that and I like people watching. Hong Kong is a great place to people watch.

It is a great place to photograph as it has so much to offer in terms of texture, bouncing light off the buildings, organized chaos and masses of people but it is also a challenging place to photograph too as most people don’t like to have their photo taken so it can bequite hostile. I don’t take your regular Hong Kong sky line building shots but I like to focus on getting close to a person or group of people and capture a moment in their journey from A to B, a moment of solitude, a moment of desire, a moment of happiness or a moment of loneliness or sadness which are all happening simultaneously like dots within a sea of people. Hong Kong is the most densely populated city in the world.

There’s a lot happening in a small space. Every person has their individual story. From the old lady pushing the trolley on the streets to collect cardboard for money to the man in banking who lives a life of luxury and greed but possibly not with a lot of happiness and then there are all the people in between. That’s city life which fascinates me.

Unfortunately though, the best photos I do take are often when I don’t have my camera in my hand or when I’m too slow and miss it. My photos of Hong Kong don’t have titles as I’m hoping the viewer can interpret the story for themselves.