Achronicity and Place
Our memories prompt us to reflect on who we are and have been. They’re the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, irretrievably tied to times and places in our past. Their details and how we come to understand them may change, a reminder that as the world evolves, we do, too. As a medium, photography naturally finds itself positioned between the fixed and the ephemeral. A photograph freezes an instant, yet in doing so, it lies. It suggests that what was seen can be known when seeing is only ever partial. We observe, but do we ever truly understand? A photograph offers everything and explains nothing. In this way, it mirrors memory itself, unstable, shifting, never whole.
My practice, in part, explores this friction. For the events of a photograph, memory, and moment meet, diverge and become something else, a contemplation of experience, a subjective rendering, often hiding its context, authorship, and the web of relationships it presents to its viewer.
Within these elongated exposures surfaces are exaggerated and abstracted gestures, objects, and forms, leave impressions of activity on the camera’s sensor visible to the human eye only later. The resulting photographs resemble found objects, the results from chance encounters, rendering events into pixels and offering fragmented views like memories obscured by time.
There might be a tendency to see this sort of photography as bleak. Undoubtedly, high-contrast black-and-white photography is, in its nature, stark. However, I see the black of an image not necessarily as a negative space but as a space of reflection. This idea echoes filmmaker Chris Marker’s realisation in Sans Soleil’s opening scene, featuring the imagery of the children on the road in Iceland, an ‘image of happiness’. He muses, ‘One day, I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.’1 Similarly, in these photographs, I think of the black as a ‘cinematic black’, a fade-to-black, not necessarily an absence, but an invitation for contemplation and transition, a space not to find answers, but to sit within the shadows, to look without fully knowing.
Though seemingly disparate, both approaches, embracing chance with slow shutter speeds and seeking a form of realism through high contrast, speak to the same desire: to consider the ephemeral nature of time and experience and the different aspects of this place, Hong Kong. Both approaches acknowledge the limitations of photography in capturing what is actual and lean into the subjective nature of seeing and remembering.
In this way, stepping outside, camera in hand, becomes a form of catharsis, making sense of change. In the words of cultural theorist Ackbar Abbas: ‘It is not a matter of producing more or better photographs of Hong Kong, but of using the photograph as a means of seeing what is involved in looking at and thinking about the city.’2 This act of intentionality cannot be understated, I think. I’ve found that genuinely looking and observing takes time and practice. A deliberate switching of channels. Turning down the anxiety and noise of one’s mind, feeling every footstep and every breath, and seeing clearly with one’s own eyes. This practice mirrors the act of remembering, not to capture something fixed, but to sit with impermanence, to recognise that meaning, like memory, is always shifting, always just beyond full comprehension.
–Chris Sullivan
1 Sans Soleil, directed by Chris Marker (Argos Films, 1983).
2 Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 91.