Hong Kong In Motion

Photographs of cities can convey something of the texture of the sidewalk, and certainly do a good job conveying skylines or monumental spaces. But it’s harder to capture the flow of a city: how the urban landscape changes as you move through it -- or in the case of some cities, how little it changes. I was struck walking around Kowloon at how discontinuous the space was: simply trying to walk from a subway stop to the harbor could take you from a generic underpass to a brassy shopping mall to a broad avenue that could have been designed by Baron Haussmann, to a crowded Bladerunner-style alley teeming with electronic stores and massage parlors. Then just as quickly you’re in an open public space that might be the revived harbor front in Baltimore were it not for the over-the-top skyline across the water. In Manhattan terms, it was a little like condensing Chinatown, Madison Avenue, Battery Park City, and the Time-Warner Center shopping mall into one five-block area.
When I walked around on Sunday, it occurred to me what you needed to convey this quality of the city was not a photograph -- it was an accelerated, time-lapse-style film that emphasized the movement and change in the environment, and not just a static tableau. So I bought a little digital camera in one of those Bladerunner stores and did a five block walk through Kowloon, snapping a picture every fifteen feet or so. Turning it into a movie was literally a three step process: I imported into iPhoto, then opened iMovie and grabbed the whole sequence, and told iMovie to make a slideshow where each picture only lasts for five frames. You can see the end result for yourself. It’s not perfect, by any means -- it might be better shot on video and then accelerated somehow, since the illusion of physical movement isn’t as strong as I was hoping it would be. And the environmental shock of the sudden transition into mallspace isn’t conveyed very well, particularly in the second mall I stumbled into, which only gets a couple of frames. But as a way of capturing the feel of a neighborhood, I think it’s an interesting beginning. It’d be fascinating to see others capture comparable sequences in their own travels (or their own home cities.)

Comments

[Alex Wright]

Nicely done. Godfrey Reggio's got nothing on you.

fwiw, I did something similar a few years ago on a drive cross-country:

http://www.agwright.com/photos/places/x-country_0801/triptych.htm

[disanpoter]

that link to the video clip (http://stevenberlinjohnson.typepad.com/stevenberlinjohnsoncom/hk.mov) didn't work. neither did abriging to /hk.mov. maybe it's a domain cloaking glitch?

sounds intriguing, though.

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