Flatbed
2019—2025
Compiled in 2025
Photography (B/W), Text
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.
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.
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—a result of years of hauling flat-packed desks from warehouse to car boot—requiring constant attention. 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 footbrake when it inevitably catches a stray strip of plastic. The camera only captures gestures, not stories.
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.
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. Mixed-use buildings extend over pavements, their upper residential floors creating utilitarian porticos, before tapering back at their rooftops like Tetris blocks. Space is limited. The only place to go is up.
On the overpass above Ching Cheung Road, I find a colony of macaques in a fruiting tree. Below us, metal containers flow in tightly timed convoys. One sits apart from the others, ignoring the traffic, watching something in the canopy with meditative stillness, oblivious to the din below. We regard each other, distant primate cousins, two displaced observers at the city’s margin.
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.
Recently, I’ve fallen asleep to the sound of rainfall and condensate falling on my air conditioner—the ambient percussion of the place I’ve called home for close to ten years. When sleep won’t come, I listen closer. Through the hum of machines, other rhythms emerge from twenty storeys below: the clatter of glass being sorted, buses releasing their pneumatic sighs, and the metallic processional of trolleys shuttling between the loading dock and the supermarket floor. These sounds mark the city’s third shift, the labour that prepares tomorrow’s ordinary.
The work I observe is not waiting to be seen. It continues in registers that the camera cannot measure.