sightseeing

Threeway Action

 

Yes, we were making videos. No, not that kind of video.

Brangewhattawhat?

I don't usually read gossip and celebrity rags. No, really.

Bright Lights, Big City

Fiends of Kowloon

Fiends, friends, same difference. Taken on the roof of a carpark overlooking Kowloon's vanished walled city.

Visual Cues

Not terribly exciting, I know, but I've barely had a second to breathe today. This is a snapshot of what I'm working on.

Holy Bucket

 
Behold! A solitary bucket making its way up the Midlevels escalator. I think the woman at the top was expecting it.

Roland Fischer

Woot! There's a little review of mine in Time Out about an exhibition by German conceptual photographer Roland Fischer. Not sure why Andreas Gursky's last name is spelled "Gurksy", or why the show got 5 stars rather than 4 (my original rating). Still, the show's definitely worth checking out. Fischer's large-format works are remarkable not for what they show, but for what they don’t, and remind us, as Susan Sontag wrote, that photography is merely “a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom,” always concealing more than it reveals.

Now hie thee to the Goethe Gallery!

Look Up

"And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow."
-G.K. Chesterton

Stop, Save

At 2.28pm, all over China, people stopped what they were doing for three minutes to commemorate the tens of thousands of victims of last week's quake in Sichuan. Official figures (as of May 20, 18:00 CST):

• 40,075 confirmed dead, including 39,577 in Sichuan province, and 247,645 injured, and up to 5 million homeless

• 158 relief workers killed in landslides over the last three days

The statistics are horrifying, but taken by themselves they're at once meaningful and meaningless. How can you measure the human cost of tragedy, let alone on such a monumental scale?

Photography helps to convey the impact of disaster on a firsthand, immediate level. But while we've all seen the pictures of buildings reduced to rubble, the 360-degree panoramas, the in-your-face shots showing physical trauma or worse (the day after the quake, the SCMP made a controversial decision to feature a picture of a dead child on the front page), some of the most haunting images have been captured away from the frontlines. I'm thinking in particular of this shot by Shiho Fukada for the New York Times:

The accompanying article is about the onset of "hopelessness" after the miracle rescues of the weekend, but the image almost trumps it in terms of storytelling, emotional content and lingering impact.

Meantime, Myanmar is still drowning. It officially began three days of mourning for its 133,000 cyclone victims but stubbornly resists foreign aid. Tempting as it is to succumb to disaster fatigue, though, there are still millions of people who need help. If you haven't already, now's the time: donate, donate, donate.

Ruletown

I walk through this alleyway almost every day, but I've never before taken picture of it. If I hadn't started this  blog, this would never have been snapped at quarter to midnight, and I'd be left with nothing to show for my Monday besides a sore throat, a few scraps of laundry and a blood-red constellation of kisses, courtesy of the city's amorous insects.