Scottish photographer John Thomson (1837-1921) proceeded on a photography expedition in Asia, especially China, in the late 1860s. He later stayed in Hong Kong, by then a British Colony, for four years and opened a photography studio in the city. During that time, he shot many of the local landscapes and portraitures in Hong Kong. When I revisited the portraits he did then, I was surprised to find that there was not much nostalgia in my heart. Many of these portraits and the characters that appeared in different street scenes are of the lower class. It’s hard to find any joyfulness in their faces, and sometimes they even look pessimistic. If you remove the symbols of the era in the photos, they still look familiar and relevant to our world today.
No matter how society has progressed through the years and how wealth has been vastly accumulated, we still can’t get rid of the same problems faced by society over a hundred years ago. The disparity of wealth and the disrepair in the fringe society remains the same. My project, originally intended to be a photographic journey of "rediscovering", thus has evolved into a "reaffirming" act to this phenomenon.
This time I turned Thomson’s portraits into a number of “pull-up displays” which are presently a kind of popular pop-up billboards to promote various kinds of commodities in Hong Kong. These pull-up displays are placed in today's urban scene in Hong Kong. The pull-up displays, just like those lower class families living in today or in the past, exist in society discordantly, but are hidden before our eyes. Dustin Shum
(Featured in the Pingyao International Photography Festival 2011)
Kwun Tong, 7/2011
A primary school which has forced to close down, Kwun Tong, 8/2011
To Kwa Wan, 8/2011
Sham Shui Po, 8/2011
Tin Shui Wai (II), 7/2011
Tin Shui Wai (I), 7/2011
Kwun Tong, 7/2011
A primary school which has forced to close down, Kwun Tong, 8/2011
To Kwa Wan, 8/2011
Sham Shui Po, 8/2011
Tin Shui Wai (II), 7/2011
Tin Shui Wai (I), 7/2011
dustin shum | photographer
Dustin Shum (岑允逸) is a documentary and fine art photographer based in Hong Kong.