This is the first image in my Hong Kong photo project, which was initially conceived as a kind of subjective photo diary, involving at least one black and white photo taken every day for the last five years of the millennium, a period of two and a half years either side of the end of British colonial rule over Hong Kong in mid-1997. Sometimes I would take more than one photo on a day, but I would decide which photo represented each day after looking at the contact sheets. Digital photography wasn't developed enough to be used at the time I started this project for the kind of informal street photography that interested me, so till around 2004 I used 35mm film. Portable digital cameras were available before that latter point in time but I had wanted to retain a degree of continuity through the project so I persisted with film for some time. In line with my idea that a picture of Hong Kong would emerge gradually over the course of the project I was happy to start off with an image that just treated one small detail of my immediate surroundings. Many of the images in this archive are like individual tiles in a mosaic - not particularly interesting in isolation, but hopefully contributing to the creation of a bigger picture in juxtaposition with others. I was not attempting to sum up Hong Kong in a single image! Unlike a photojournalist I wasn't needing to sum up a subject in one single legible image.
At this point I was living in rented University of Hong Kong staff quarters on Sha Wan Drive in Sandy Bay.
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