Search

This paper is about an ongoing funded street photography and practice-led creative writing research project set in Hong Kong that has since been derailed both by the 2019 anti-government protests and by the Covid-19 pandemic. Various places in Hong Kong that had been previously chosen as sites of exploration were at times overwritten by anti-government graffiti, with the mood on the ground also overdetermined by the pandemic. Hence, the social environment is marked with anxiety and caution. This becomes an opportunity for reworking and rethinking. By means of aesthetic responsiveness via street photography, coupled with an autoethnographic-based documentary writing, Hong Kong is allowed to speak its moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author presents a paper on practices of writing poetry, taking street photographs and creative writing scholarship. He mentions of the photograph 'Street Photography: From Atget to Cartier-Bresson,' by photographer Clive Scott that makes a distinction between documentary photography and street photography. He also discusses difference between documentary photography and street photography.

This paper is part of an ongoing auto-ethnographic project to do with writing poetry and taking photographs in Hong Kong. As a poet who is interested in the aesthetic potential of visual images, I am intrigued by what Michel de Certeau calls the "absent figure," a figure often obscured by techniques and rationalities that govern the everyday life of the urban city that is Hong Kong (vi). If art is about the salvaging of meaning, then it is in league with everyday life, to the extent that artistic works become transgressive and predatory mediums. Poems and photographs are regarded here as forms that usurp the material spaces of Hong Kong. In this way, one is led to consider the possibilities of cultural production as a kind of furtive production wherein the everyday life of Hong Kong is made to speak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]