(Drunken Sailor 1966)
Yau Leung was a widely-recognised local photographer known for his fruitful accomplishments in documentary photographs. His works are almost exclusively in black and white, capturing the iconic images of Hong Kong and its people from the 1960s and 1970s. First a photographer working for one after another local film production companies from the mid-1960s to early 1970s, he later started the Photographic Life monthly in 1973 and assumed chief editorship for the Art of Photography monthly in the 1980s. Fame brought him a good number of chances to publish his works in albums and exhibitions both locally and in the Mainland China.
Thanks to his sharp eye and deft hand, the frozen moments preserved in the master’s images provide animated records of Hong Kong in his times. Those pictures showing the lives of the grassroots are especially moving, in which permeates the mood of plebeian simplicity. It is exactly because of such simplicity that the inclusion of non-plebeian elements could add an extra dimension of paradoxical mood to the final image. Sometimes the image can be so paradoxical as to be humourous and ironic.
The image featured in this post is paradoxical in that the scene seemingly defies the rule whereby gweilos were superior and the Chinese inferior in the British Hong Kong back then. The drunken white guy is not a usual gweilo but a US naval solider, which even more heightens the irony figuratively represented by a fallen white being looked down upon by a teenage Chinese girl. The incidental composition exaggerating the proportion of the fallen drunk man and the upright figure of the girl also contributes effectively to the visual metaphor.
For more of Yau's photographic works, check them out here.
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