chris.photo

Flatbed


How do repeated actions shape what we know?
HK
2019—2025
Compiled in 2025
Photography (B/W), Text

Contact for use. Note: Some images on this page have been sliced. Alternative (alt) text is included in the first slice of each image.
001
The morning heat has already settled over Sham Shui Po. Exhaust from an idling bus at the pedestrian crossing mixes with the sweet rot from nearby fruit stalls. Polystyrene boxes, now free of wares, jump pedestrian railings and pile into the street, forming haphazardly stacked leaning towers, around which clandestine groups of men smoke cigarettes and trade jade ornaments.

Above street level, steam belches from the municipal building’s extraction vent. Below, a man emerges from the Pei Ho Street wet market, pushing a flatbed trolley stacked with cardboard boxes.
002
003
The camera isolates him in shadow at 1/640th of a second, the highlight-weighted exposure drawn to his hands and the trolley’s handle. The technical choice underscores my role as observer. This asymmetry is the frame’s condition: his labour continues, uninterrupted; my lens captures but a fragment.
004
 Fifteen years and 8,000 kilometres from a Melbourne office supply store, muscle memory fires. The ongoing discomfort in my lower back is a souvenir of that time, requiring constant attention from years of hauling flat-packed desks from warehouse to car boot. The trolley summons recognition, but it is limited, partial, and bound by my own experiences. The man pushing the trolley navigates his morning route with practised efficiency. His body carries knowledge I cannot access: which routes avoid crowds and direct sun, how to lean into the trolley’s weight when the wheels stick on uneven pavement, how to unstick the footbreak when it inevitably catches a stray strip of plastic. The camera only captures gestures, not stories.
005
006
 Walking has become my method. Hours dissolve this way. Humidity clings to everything, and walking the street feels like wading through a tub of tepid water. Above, condensation drips from air conditioning units. You learn to read the footpath’s darker patches and thus sidestep impromptu baptisms. 
007
008
Twice carried. (009)
009
His shadow reads along. (011)
010
011
Handling what can’t be handled bare. (012)
012
I cross busy arterial roads that define the periphery of the city’s neighbourhoods, Sham Shui Po into Cheung Sha Wan, Chuk Un into San Po Kong. In Kennedy Town, I notice crowds of people by the roadside making portraits and selfies, hemmed in by barriers and signs urging them not to disrupt traffic. They’re drawn by webs of invisible followers, dressed for the feed, converging on the same street sign. The location has become a backdrop because of how it looks on screen. 

Elsewhere, industrial zones blend into residential and commercial blocks. Mixed-use buildings extend over pavements, their upper residential floors creating utilitarian porticos, before tapering back at their rooftops like Tetris blocks. The city compresses at street level, expands vertically, and is contained at its edges by the ocean and the mountains that run from Hong Kong Island across the border into Guangdong. Space is limited. The only place to go is up.
013
On the overpass above Ching Cheung Road, I find a colony of macaques in a fruiting tree beside a Buddhist Association building. Below us, metal containers flow in tightly timed convoys. 

One macaque sits apart from the others, ignoring the traffic, watching something in the canopy with meditative stillness, oblivious to the din below. Here, time falters. We regard each other, distant primate cousins, two displaced observers at the city’s margin.
 
014
Different fabric, same garden. (015—016)
015
016
 The man pushing his trolley back in Sham Shui Po doesn’t look up at me or my camera. His work continues regardless of my attention. The gulf between his labour and my looking feels absolute, and perhaps that needs acknowledging, not connection but distance; the limits of what a photograph can hold.
017
Perforated boundary. (018)
018
What’s carried. (019—020)
019
020
 Recently, I’ve fallen asleep to the sound of rainfall and air-conditioner condensate. The ambient percussion of the subtropical archipelago I’ve called home for close to ten years. When sleep won’t come, I simply listen closer. Through the hum of machines, other rhythms emerge: the clatter of metal collection twenty storeys below, the percussion of glass being sorted, buses releasing their pneumatic sighs as commuters disembark. The metallic processional of trolleys between the loading dock and the shop floor. These sounds mark the city’s third shift, the labour that prepares tomorrow’s ordinary.
021
Someone else’s gaze. (022)
022
Carrying one’s own atmosphere. (023)
023
 Come morning, I’ll walk again. 
024


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