So here is an interesting question—

What photographs do you take when you are saying goodbye?

Photographs, for viewers, are almost always introductions. Whatever scene is being portrayed is, for us, more often than not, fresh and new. No matter how well the photographer may know the subject and setting, we lack historical and situational context, so the image is a kind of first blush. Even if we know the milieu, we are being introduced to the artist’s vision and interpretation.

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“Hong Kong” by Mikko Takkunen
Published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 2024
review by W. Scott Olsen

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This is particularly true of narrative photography.

Think about real estate photography that shows beautiful, sunlit rooms, large windows, perpetually good weather outdoors, spotless shelves, and countertops. Those images are intended as introductions and temptations. But what if the intent were to capture the look of leave-taking? What pictures of a beloved home do you take when you are leaving for good?

Those images might very well be scratches on a wall made by a beloved cat. They might be pencil drawings on a closet frame that shows how tall children were at a certain age. The images would be signifiers of stories and connections and moods.

The pictures would be replete with their evocation of memory. And while they may not make a lot of sense to the uninitiated, once you realize these pictures are pictures of leave-taking, you start looking for a different story. You start looking for a different message, a different mood, a different emotion.

While it can be argued that a successful image should not require an explanation to be appreciated, that does not mean that an image’s explication cannot make it richer, cannot place it more in context, and give us a deeper sense of what the artist hopes.

There is a new book by Mikko Takkunen, simply called Hong Kong. And the key to the book is at the very end. Writing from New York in June of 2023, Takkunen says,

In early 2020, change was in the air in Hong Kong, not just for city itself, reeling from protests and on the precipice of pandemic, but for me, personally. I knew my family’s days there were numbered.

According to the book’s information, Takkenen was a photo editor at the New York Times foreign desk, and he spent more than five years in Hong Kong as the desk’s Asia photo editor.

The pandemic and the protests caused a change of plans. He writes,

There was a sense that Hong Kong as we knew it might cease to exist, at least in the way that had long seduced people from around the world. People like me, a gweilo, an outsider who’d grown to love the city.

With the seclusion of the pandemic, he felt a need to spend more time taking his own pictures. He writes,

I settled for taking pictures of the rooftops and streets below our bedroom window, feeling a bit like Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window”. But eventually, I began roaming the city at night, seeking whatever relief I could in a world that felt like it was coming to an end. I was desperate to capture Hong Kong anew: its lights, its colours, its contours. On my days off I would ride trams and ferries for hours on end, obsessing about possible scenes I had in mind. And yet, the more I photographed, the more I worried about what might still go unseen before the city changed irrevocably – or I had to leave.

These photographs are my last embrace of Hong Kong. They are also my farewell.

This book, in a word, is brilliant. And I mean that in two ways. It is brilliant aesthetically in its use of composition and subject matter, in the way it seeks to give light to a city and the artist’s relationship to it. It is also brilliant, visually, in that, more perhaps even than Hong Kong itself, this is a book about color.

This is a book where the colors of Hong Kong are the subject. It’s not sociology. It’s not politics, not economics, not ethnography or history. This is a book about the mood of Hong Kong from a deeply personal point of view, expressed in color.

The book has an eloquent introduction by Geoff Dyer. In it, he writes,

The pictures in this book are of Hong Kong. They were taken between February 2020, and June 2021, by Miko Takkunen, and they are in color. But it seems to me, to put it somewhat clumsily, they ask us to ask a slightly different question to the one we began with, or a different version of it, at least, not just, what are these colors of but where do they come from? On the face of it, it’s easy to answer, using the philosophical principles of Gary Winogrand, who pointed out with implacable logic that if you photograph a lot in Texas, and your pictures are going to look a lot like Texas. They are the colors of Hong Kong, because the pictures were taken in Hong Kong.

He continues,

The colors are a function of weather, geography, architecture and design as a species, the people moving within these framing elements and forms have remained physically unaltered in 1000s of years, even if some of them have been alive for Less than two decades…Neon blazes with perpetual promise. Neon in the rain and Twilight, sleeping in puddles is bathed in the memory of romantic dreams…where do they come from? These colors from Hong Kong, necessarily, because these are the colors of the things in the pictures, the red of the Red Lanterns, the painted yellow stripes of crosswalks and so on.

Hong Kong is very much a book not about what Hong Kong looks like, although it certainly has that element, as much as what that Look looks like and feels like. This is a mood book, an impressionist book. At times, Hong Kong is a city exploding with color, and these are the markings that the artist will take with him when he leaves.

When you take color as your leading compositional desire, you wind up with a collection of images that are asking for a different response. Very much the same way that impressionist painting asks for a different response, or watercolor asks for a different appreciation than oil. What pictures do you take when you’re leaving? You’re not so much interested in what something looks like as trying to capture the mood of a memory.

I have been to Hong Kong, although only once, very briefly, and a long time ago. Nonetheless, my memories are visually vivid.  The city does that to you. I cannot say I know any of the sites in Hong Kong, but looking through the book, I kept feeling, oh yes, yes, exactly. In sharing the images of his soon to be memory, he has in that memory a mood that is a world of experience and love.

A note from FRAMES: Please let us know if you have an upcoming or recently published photography book.