(Skirt Up: This is my favorite photo in the exhibition. It was taken during a memorial service to pay tribute to the British soldiers died in the fighting against the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong. The memorial service was held once a year in Hong Kong during the Bristish colonial rule. It still is but not at the Cenotaph adjoining the Statue Square in Central)
I am just back from the “Imaging Hong Kong” photography exhibition. Some of the exhibited photos were intriguing in the way they were presented. Photography has a very long history in Hong Kong, which is actually as long as since the French government announced the invention of photography in 1839. Not long afterwards in 1845, the first photographic studio was established by a Mr West at Sydenham Terrace near Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong. In the beginning, under the British colonial rule, all the photographers in Hong Kong were expats but in around 1860, local Chinese photographers began to emerge. Among them Afong Lai, owner of the locally renowned Afong Studio, was especially famed. Both foreign and local customers praised Afong for his scenery and portrait works. His works are available for sale in different countries and on the Internet.
(3-D Marketplace: The photographers made a large print of the photo and painstakingly pasted same overlapping images on the large print to present the marketplace in a three dimensional way)
Art photography was first recorded in Hong Kong around 1888, when a photography group called the Camera Club exhibited some ninety photographs in the City Hall, the then only performing and cultural complex here. But it was only until the late 1920s to the 1930s when the art photography scene became livelier, with annual photo contests and the emergence of more photographic societies. The number of art photographers further increased in the 1950s, among whom many won entries or awards in international photographic salons, making some hail Hong Kong as the “The Kingdom of Photography”.
(Recording Redevelopment: Another photographer consistently took pictures of the street from its prime time with old shops (the middle row of photos) to its doomsday (rows of photos both ways from the middle row) when the government forced a redevelopment of it )
Generally speaking, local photographic works prior to the 1970s belonged to the style of Pictorialism, which aspired to make photographs look like paintings following classical rules of composition and with didactic messages. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the first generation of post-war, locally-born photographers arose; man were educated abroad for new ideas about photography. These photographers representing a “new school” advocating the aesthetics of “straight photography” which argued that a photographer should explore the medium’s intrinsic properties and truthfully express the nature of the subjects through his or her viewpoints. In the 1990s, under the influence of postmodernism and post-colonialism, some photographers produced works that emphasised symbolic meanings and cultural awareness instead of forms. A noticeably greater diversity of art photography styles started to breed and has been carrying on the evolution until today.
(Leica prototype 35mm camera)
Besides this, I had the opportunity to see some old camera exhibits a month ago. The Leica prototype of one of its early 35mm cameras, the Compur model, interested me the most, also not least was the Konica C35AF. The Camerapedia.org puts it this way, “The C35AF is a "milestone" camera in that it was the world's first production autofocus camera. It used the "Visitronic" AF system developed and produced by Honeywell. This was a "passive" rather than the subsequently more popular "active" system (annouced two years later by Canon in the AF35M).”
(Konica C35AF. Too dim, no flash allowed and a bit blurry)
So, we are in a way given a tool passed on by people from as far back as over 150 years ago. In the "Imaging Hong Kong" exhibition, I admired some old photos a lot as they recorded the daily life as it was in the old days. This strike me that photographers, besides having fun in taking photos, have a duty somehow to use the tool to give the memory back to the next generations.
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