A Short Stay Under Hong Kong Skyline

Travel photography has never been easy.

Nineteen years ago, when I began working as a journalist, my editor told me that a journalist must have a perspective. Simply recording scenes was not enough. I’m not sure if that rule still holds true today, but it left a mark on me.

Photography while travelling feels similar. The thrill of a new place often produces little more than plain recordings. Once the excitement fades, those images lose their shine. True perspective only arrives after staying long enough, when my rhythm merges with the rhythm of a place, and the everyday begins to reveal what is truly interesting.

Hong Kong allowed no such luxury. I had less than twelve hours during a transfer between Australia and the United States, hardly enough to form a relationship with the city.

My only impressions came from old crime movies, which painted it as dark, wet, chaotic, and materialistic, a contrast to tourism brochures promising glamorous skylines and high life behind glass and steel. Perhaps because of that, I avoided landmarks and wandered instead beneath the skyscrapers, through Mong Kok, Tsim Sha Tsui, Wan Chai, and Causeway Bay. Narrow alleys, dripping scaffolding, overflowing trash bins formed the world beneath the skyline.

The reality wasn’t too different from my imagination, but it struck in another way: rain came and went, mixed with over forty degrees of suffocating heat. As someone with Siberian heritage, built for the cold with layers of fat, such weather felt like hell.

At some point I stopped resisting. I accepted the sweat, the mist, and the sour odor lingering in between. I felt like I was sinking into the moist air, melting into the damp heat on everyone’s back, flowing with the dirty streams along the edges of the streets. That was the moment the city began to look different.

And in this world I began to notice the layers of life. Elegant women waited for night buses while schoolgirls wandered through back alleys. An old man sat silently in the corner of a busy intersection. Prostitutes in white pantyhose and short skirts searched for customers. Around them rose the steel frames and neon lights. It all felt like chaos, yet also a strange balance: slumdog life and high life existing side by side, irrelevant people brushing past each other yet sharing the same ground.

After hours of exploring I left with no skyline photos, only fragments from underneath. What I recorded held a perspective unlike any postcard view. Humid, messy, and unresolved, just like the city itself.

P.S. Photos were taken with a Minolta Alpha 9 using a 28mm f/2.8, 85mm f/1.8, and 500mm f/8 lens, on Ilfocolor 400 film.

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