In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

138 Revisions At the suggestion of art critic Lau Kin-wai, I was invited by Ka-sing and Holly Lee, the editors ofDislocation, to be the guest editor ofan issue. Because Dislocation is a photography magazine, and photography lives happily with mechanical reproduction, being invited to edit an issue is rather like being invited to curate an exhibition. Rather than just choosing pre-existing images, I wanted to come up with a project which would involve photographers in a more active way. Revisions was the result, and it appeared in the October 1995 issue. Concept For this issue of Dislocation I have invited a number of photographic artists to submit a pair of images. The first of the two photos had to be taken at some time in the past (at the very latest, before the invitation to participate in this project was received). The second photo had to be taken at some time following the invitation (with this particular project in mind), and had to engage in some way with the first image, or with its subject. The second photo needed to be by the invited photographer, although the first didn't necessarily have to be. The intention was that the two images would be displayed as a pair, but photographers were told that they could join the two images together in some way if they wished, or present one image instead of two as long as the idea of engaging with a preexisting source image had been adhered to. The idea behind the project was to take advantage of photography's ability to specify a particular moment in time (the moment when film is exposed to light), and produce a juxtaposition of past and present in some way of the photographer's choosing. I attempted to design a project which had an overall coherence, but also room for freedom of interpretation by photographers working in quite different idioms. Interpretation I had envisaged that one possible way of interpreting the concept of Revisions would be to look again at a place that had been previously photographed, and document the ways in which it had changed. In particular, I had imagined that artists might engage with Hong Kong, and investigate the transformations it has undergone over the years. Photographic images, with their ability to pinpoint specific times, would be especially well-equipped for this task of historical investigation. Alfred Ko, Ken Wong and Raymond Chan did indeed take urban Hong Kong as their subject, foregrounding change rather than continuity, and the first two both focused on the theme of land reclamation. Ken Wong's two images of Yau Ma Tei typhoon shelter (fig. 20.1; fig. 20.2) are separated by only one year, but the transformation is radical. His contribution is not some nostalgic statement about a traditional way of life destroyed by modernization: the process of development seems already to have begun by the time the first photo was taken, and it is more like the replacement of one type of wasteland by another. Nevertheless the space shown in the first image did have room for human occupation (even if not community), whereas the second image is one from which human presence has been fenced out. Only a dog has been able to gain entry. That sense of exclusion is also emphasized in Raymond Chan's second image (plate 12). Again there is a physical barrier, but this time our vision is also denied access. The cutting of the human figure by the framing edge of the image helps underline its theme of displacement, which can be sensed in Alfred Ko's second photograph too. The reclamation work seems to have forced us back from the waterfront, as if even the same viewpoint (which Ken Wong carefully retains) is no longer possible. No rosy view of the past exists here either: the aircraft carrier is American rather than British, but it does remind us of Hong Kong's colonial status. The sailing junk which it dwarfs might symbolize the past (it still does in tourist images), but I'm pretty sure it's equipped with a motor - this is a modern-day sign of the past, rather than a true survival of it. At first sight it might seem as if Albert Li's images belong alongside those I have already mentioned, but in fact his two images are not an exploration of the same place at different times. The first may be a Hong Kong image (from...

Share