Tai Tam Road at night. This road has taken me nearly everywhere in Hong Kong…and tomorrow, it will take me home. Or at least start me off on one long journey home.
Well, here it is. The final post of Holland in Hong Kong. I leave for Australia tomorrow and eventually return to Boston on the 26th.
Wow. 38 days. 40 entries. 44 photos. Hundreds of places, faces, and experiences. Some good, some bad. Some memorable, others have already escaped my mind.
So, originally this was supposed to be strictly a photo-blog. I planned to post one photograph per day. Maybe include a caption for clarification.
But pictures are supposed to be worth a thousand words, right? Why not tell the story with those thousand words?
Pictures are worth any number of words. Photographs are worth any number of unspoken words. They silently, visually tell a story. Ideally, I should have been able to post compelling photographs without any sort of literal explanation, for that’s what I consistently strive for as a photographer. Words detract from the visual richness of photographs. They dull the diverse range of stories and insight viewers gain. Words tell the viewer what to think; the element of interpretation is lost…along with it, the thinking, the discussion, the controversy. What’s to debate if the answer is there in writing?
So, if my opinion on the matter of text is so concrete, why did I include it in each post?
Because I still don’t know what story I’m trying to tell. 44 photographs later, and I’m still asking myself what my photos are communicating. I guess I pair anecdotes, some short, some long, with my photographs in an attempt to personally understand what I’m seeing. Perhaps if I write it out, I’ll finally learn my own story.
But I haven’t learned it yet. Maybe I’ll understand the story a few days after I leave. Maybe in a few years, a few decades. Maybe I’ll be 105 years old, sitting in the garden of a nursing home, and I’ll finally figure out what I tried to communicate so many years ago. Maybe I’ll die without fully knowing.
Hong Kong threw me off big time. I got off that plane on May 10th thinking I was in for some grand, Nat-Geo style, rustic adventure. I thought I’d fill this blog with photos of poor Asian children eating bowls of day-old rice and Buddhist monks praying in lavish temples that would put Angkor Wat to shame. But instead I found myself immersed in a flashy, ex-patriate lifestyle. It felt like Glen Ellyn with a little more money, servants, and humidity. I initially thought I could walk down the street and easily end up on the set of a Travel Channel special. All I found at the end of the street were luxury high rises and a 7Eleven. I was disappointed, but I adjusted my photographic ambitions and worked to accurately depict what I saw. And that’s where my story becomes hazy. I witnessed an unexpectedly wild and unpleasing lifestyle that rivaled Gossip Girl’s story line. I lived next to families that employed three domestic helpers and two drivers, and treated them like garbage. I met people ruder than Kanye West. But I also spent six weeks surrounded by monstrous, green mountains and deep cerulean seas. I saw more color in the street markets than inside my box of 120 Crayola crayons. The skyline of central Hong Kong took my breath away every time.
Society versus setting. Those two elements are responsible for my incomplete story. I can’t embrace one without the other. Obviously I wish to solely focus on the positive setting, but to disregard the negative society would make me a coward. I have two extreme opinions of two extreme elements. The two seem to coexist in this country, but for some reason remain separate in my mind. Therefore my opinion remains unbalanced, undecided, and unreachable. My story, still unwritten. My visual story, my most important story, unfortunately, still unseen.
But right now, it’s time to go home.
The end.
