Paying attention

Most of my day is split. A screen, a message, half a conversation while I think about something else.

With a camera in my hand that stops. I am not doing three things any more. I am looking at one street and asking one question: where is the photograph in this?

That question changes what I see. I notice which side of the street the light is on, and when it will leave. I notice that people cross at the same spot every few seconds, and that the gap between them is where the picture is. I notice a sign I would have walked past, and then I wait for someone to walk under it.

It is a narrow kind of focus, and I think that is why I like it. There is no room for anything else. An hour goes by and I have not looked at my phone, because the phone cannot tell me anything the street can’t.

It only shows what was there

The other reason is harder to explain. A photograph cannot show something that was not in front of the lens. To make Neon Nights I had to be standing in Kowloon, at night, under those signs. The signs above that street advertise a mahjong parlour and a karaoke club, stacked three deep and still burning in a city that has been taking its neon down for years. They were the reason I stopped.

I adjust light and colour the way a darkroom would, and I stop there. I don’t add skies and I don’t remove people. If a frame needs more than that, it wasn’t the frame.

That is also why the captions on this site are only facts: title, place, year. The picture has already said what it has to say.

Monster Building, Quarry Bay.

Deciding what stays out

Every photograph is mostly a decision about what to leave out. The Monster Building in Quarry Bay is one of the most photographed buildings in Hong Kong. What I wanted was the moment you look straight up and the walls close in until the sky is a strip. Everything else stays outside the frame.

That is the part I enjoy most. Not pressing the shutter, but the minutes before it, when I take a step left, crouch, wait, and slowly narrow a whole city down to one rectangle.