I’ve already been in this city, it knows me. I was instantly taken aback by its might, energy, contrasts and paradoxes. It is intoxicating, astonishing. And also very tiring. This time, unlike on previous occasions, I am here with my 4×5 inch view camera and my boxes of out-of-date polaroids.

I would like to bring out the emotions that this city invokes in me, and to make visible this invisible force that I feel.
The power that emanates from its buildings. And also from its highways, which swell and fill, like arteries coursing through a body, the pressure rising with all the effort and toil.
Not the easiest of quests.
My mind is full of conventional visions of big-city architecture. That would be the easy way, HK lends itself willingly. But that’s not for me !

What I imagine is something different, more dream-like, calmer. Something which is both light and weighty, futuristic but which has already left its mark on time.
I want to forge a rift with this urban structuring, and restore to it its poetry.

Mysteries are what interests me, not what we already know. My old black and white polaroid films and the protocols that I drew up a few months ago in Sichuan, consisting of allowing the chemicals from the film to act on the negative matrix, might, perhaps, allow me to give body to this “fictional vision” which urges me on.

The weather is not on my side. The sky is like a sheet of zinc and yet my body and clothes are one and the same thing. The almighty humidity here is suffocating. Will it rob me of the means I need to see my adventure through to its end ?

The films are old and fragile, they are my last cartridges. They need to be treated with respect, and the heat and humidity can prove fatal to them. I have no option but
to risk everything I have. I walk a lot.

My brother Jean-Louis, who lives in HK and knows the city well, graces me with his presence and comes to my aid as a much-needed sherpa to help carry part of my equipment around. I could not do without him, for he leads me down invisible streets and places. From time to time I set down my imposing camera on its solid Gitzo tripod. I can’t get the shot I’m after, and we leave. The heat is unrelenting.

Little by little I get a feel for the city and I see what I want.
I set up, cast my gaze behind the ground glass of my view camera and the picture becomes part of a seemingly-perfect equilibrium. The zinc sheet is still positioned there just above. I wait a moment, for a hypothetical trickle of light. Nothing. I look for the shadows on walls, roofs, and streets. They emerge faintly. Perhaps it is a blessing. This dull light, a false hue, has a strange effect on the relief. City, nature and sky find themselves stuck all in the same place.

I adjust my device, measure my lights, look at the diaphragm number and the speed which my sensor on the lens has given me, and, close it. After, that is, a final check under the black cloth which cuts me off from the world and the outside light, leaving me alone to face my choice. I then fit the precious film into the view camera. I like the slowness that working with a view camera brings. A time for reflection, and applying yourself. Then, everything goes much quicker.

Thirty seconds later the polaroid renders up its picture.
I scrutinise the positive eagerly, meanwhile the chemicals on the negative discreetly continue to take effect. The picture is there, just right. The negative needs to be saved but I can feel that the strength of the humidity is changing the result and that if, as I had initially planned, I allow the chemicals to continue to act and to alter the negative in part, I risk losing this picture for ever and a day. It is the only remains of this magical moment. I decide to take the risk and, without neutralising it, I carefully place it in the plastic box.

For the rest of the day and the ten days that followed, we repeated this operation with the same eagerness, acuity and fear of watching the negatives disappear forever, due to the combined effect of the chemicals and humidity.

Back in Paris, I hastily scanned the matrixes which continued to evolve unceasingly. Some of the pictures are so altered that they are beyond retrieval, while others are just right; that is, in the spirit of my vision of this city. In them, I once again find that strength, the power of its vegetation, and that initial emotion gripped me. But also, in a magical way, the marks induced by the chemicals add to it an atmosphere of an off-beat, poetic kind – like a fiction.

To my eye there is something of a lead pencil-style Gustave Doré, or Fritz Lang in Metropolis, or Enki Bilal. I look at my pictures and think of Sarah Moon’s phrase “A true gift is when it comes unexpectedly, when the strongest thing is the picture itself.”

Thierry Arensma