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David Clarke
Photographer, lives and works in Hongkong, China
My main medium is photography. Most of the images I produce are of Hong Kong, the city where I live, or of other cities that I know reasonably well, such as Macau or Shanghai. For the most part my images are discovered rather than deliberately stalked down, since I tend to take photos in the course of my normal trajectories through the city instead of setting out to document in a more programmatic way. I tend to photograph that which is familiar or close at hand, localities and situations where I am an inhabitant or participant rather than those to which I feel an outsider. I refuse the rhetoric of truthfulness and objectivity that photography of a documentary nature often claims, and deliberately produce images that declare a certain allegiance or reveal a specific personal viewpoint. I enjoy the way photography allows me to shift between the private and the public, between a biographic mode and a more socially engaged one, although in the end the city and its transformations becomes the main subject of my images, rather than their author.
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Between 31 December 1994 and 1 January 2000 I took at least one black and white photo every day. These images form a sort of photographic diary or subjective photo-documentary record of the last five years of the previous millennium, or a period of exactly two and a half years on either side of Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty. By assembling such a quantity of photographic images (which are proverbial for their perfect memory and willingness to play the role of witness) I have hoped to create an archive that will exceed (and hence serve to counter) any ideologically-reductive historical narrative that emerges about the time and place in which they were made. I have used this archive in different ways. For instance, I exhibited a selection of the images that held together as self-contained artworks in a one-person show entitled Hong Kong Nocturne in 2002. In my book Reclaimed Land: Hong Kong in Transition (Hong Kong University Press, 2002) I featured over 300 of the images from this archive as part of a more focused analysis of Hong Kong's social transformations during the years around the end of British colonial rule and the resumption of Chinese sovereignty. In Photo Diary: 31 Dec 1994 - 1 Jan 2000, featured in Asian Traffic at the Asia-Australia Arts Centre, Sydney in 2004, I presented a strictly chronological sequence of digitized photographic images taken from this archive and projected in 'slide show' mode: each day is represented in turn by a single image. A selection of images from this archive, together with information about some of my other earlier projects, can be found at: http://www.fa.hku.hk/DavidClarkePortfolio/index.htm
After spending ten years almost exclusively working with black and white print film, I suddenly became obsessed with colour photography a little more than a year ago. This has led to a project, which has just come to its conclusion, the documentation of Hong Kong over a twelve-month period, starting from an arbitrary date. These colour digital images are mostly a little more subjective than the black and white ones, a little less documentary, but still concerned to give an image of the city during a particular historical moment. This picture emerges from the sequence as a whole, by an accumulation of details (which are preferred to well-framed views). Obliqueness is favoured as a strategy, and supposedly important sites or events are often left offstage or looked at askance. (Text by David Clarke)
