Australian visual artist Helen Boyd has a passion for capturing life in pictures while wandering our city's local streets. She shares with us some of her photos of the daily life of Hong Kong locals.
As an artist, photography is a medium I explore to archive my life, local culture, and inspire my practice. Humanity interests me, so Hong Kong’s large population is the ideal location. Locals going about their daily life naturally give clues about the culture.
As it's such a fast paced lifestyle here I find it to be a technicolour collection of opposing contrasts, a mix of traditional rituals juxtaposed by modern technology at large, and then balanced with daily customs steeped in history. Sounds overwhelming but thankfully this can be discovered just by wandering local streets.
When I studied visual arts I had the opportunity to explore the world of SLR manual camera and the darkroom! Learning how to use a camera, develop my own film, and print that same film certainly improved my ‘eye’. With digital photography I’m mindful when shooting images to capture the photograph as though I see it framed on a wall. This means I rarely crop images.
I snap photos daily and each month I try to set aside time to wander a neighbourhood to capture the essence of life there. This inspires my art-making process. I never copy from photos for my painting, but I do believe that in exploring Hong Kong, it does seep into one's visual memory and helps foster a feeling that plays out in my art. The photos featured here have been collected over a period of around six months.
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