chris.photo

Lossy


2025
Photography (Monochromatic), Text


© chris.photo. All rights reserved.
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001
 In the early nineties, I’d spend hours in MS Paint, spilling the paint bucket tool into circles, squares, and squiggly shapes, scattering the noise of the spray can over digital canvases, saving so many bitmap files along the way that I’d clog the family computer’s small hard drive with my creations. I could thus only keep a fraction of what I made; the rest went unsaved.
002—005
When I completed a Paint session and went to close the application, a dialogue box would appear, asking whether I wanted to save the file. There were three options: Yes, No, and Cancel. This moment was oddly philosophical for six-year-old me, deciding whether this thing I’d made mattered enough to keep.

Years later, the camera would inherit Paint’s role as a place to make marks, and I’d internalise the role of the dialogue box when operating its shutter.
006—007
008—009
I take in the morning air from the rooftop. To my left, a line of dragon statuettes faces the ocean. To my right, beyond the park and the basketball courts, the Island Line runs parallel to Victoria Harbour; the trains on this small section of track enjoy their brief sojourn aboveground before descending into tunnels for the rest of their passage west.

The toy camera emits its ersatz shutter sound. What appears on its tiny screen is not what I saw. The harbour has disappeared. The MTR becomes a diagonal smudge, and buildings compress to Tetris blocks.

I head for the stairwell. The door closes behind me, its latch echoing in the surrounding dimness.
010
The humidity and heat of summer have lifted, and in their absence, I notice the scent of burnt coffee. Trucks reverse behind me. Today, the cargo bay is replete with activity.

The toy camera is in my hand. My own subtraction machine. It takes this singed atmosphere, reducing what lands on its sensor to a basic chiaroscuro of zeros and ones.

It only thinks in simple terms.

A high-definition photograph claims to own what it sees. It attempts to freeze time. These images, however, are born poor: the toy camera simplifies from the start. Through its impoverishment, it seeks clarification.
011—012
The old MS Paint PC didn’t make it to my teenage years. It was the family’s machine, but the family was fractured without Mum. By the time I was finishing school, the rest of us had retreated into the folding shadows of laptops. The camera is also a lonely machine.
013
Each afternoon around 4 pm, I go up to the rooftop. The dragon statuettes regard Lohas Park across the bay. The camera cuts them from time’s flow. The shutter falls, and the noise—the static in my head, the grain in the frame—goes still.
014
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