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. Photography provides a means to examine the interplay between the fixed/ephemeral. It’s within an image that we attempt to freeze an instant. There’s an inherent tension here however, as seeing and interpreting that moment/s are ongoing acts, much like how we treat our memories. My practice, in part, explores this idea.
The past 8+ years of my work originates from Hong Kong. Cultural critic Ackbar Abbas paradoxically positions Hong Kong as existing in a state of ‘timelessnesses (achronicity) and placelessness.’¹ It’s here that my focus has gravitated towards the simultaneous existence of what appear to be moments fixed in time (photographic snapshots) engulfed by unpredictable currents (the world/change). Recent times—Hong Kong’s political unrest of 2019 and the pandemic that followed have highlighted the limitations, subjectivities, and constraints of my perspective, as someone not originally from this place but living within it. This body of work is also an attempt to navigate and wrestle with these boundaries of perspective. Which begs the question: Where might an inquiry into the nature of perspective begin?
Theorist, Ariella Azoulay, views photography as an ‘event’, a web of relationships beginning, but not ending, with the creation of the photograph. Azoulay argues that ‘photography is a product resulting from the actions of many agents and... is only a sample of the relations between people,’² noting ‘no one is the sole signatory to the event of photography.’³
Lens-based practices, such as photography, lend themselves to explorations and extended musings about our relationship with time, given the entente shared by photograph/memory/moment. I don’t seek to fix this alliance of elements in my work; instead, I attempt to examine their passage, wherein a photograph becomes a contemplation of experience, a subjective rendering acknowledging its limitation. This limitation can also be reconsidered through Azoulay’s lens of photography as an event (i.e. not a fixed point in itself), inviting ‘the gaze to wander beyond what the photograph frames.’⁴ Azoulay notes that ‘with the assistance of the spectator, the point of view under consideration here permits the event of photography to be preserved as one bearing the potential for permanent renewal that undermines any attempt to terminate it or to proclaim that it has reached its end.’⁵ I find this idea of endlessness beautiful and somewhat impossible. It’s prompted me to pause and reflect on the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ within my work, initiating an internal dialogue about ideas relating to intent, purpose, and ethical considerations surrounding a photograph.
The world within these elongated exposures surfaces exaggerated and abstracted gestures, objects, cycles, and forms, leaving impressions of activity on the camera’s sensor visible to the human eye only later. The resulting photographs resemble found objects resulting from chance encounters—a rendering of events into pixels, offering fragmented views like memories obscured by time.
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. Again, I go back to 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.’⁸ 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, allowing both the photographer and the viewer to find meaning in the transient.
–Chris
1 Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 76.2 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2024), 58.
3 Ibid., 23.
4 Ibid., 133.
5 Ibid., 33.
6 Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, 26.
7 Sans Soleil, directed by Chris Marker (Argos Films, 1983).
8 Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, 91.