How often do you fantasise travel? What does the perfect photography destination look like? How much annual leave can you afford to throw at it? In our latest Photo Diary, Tommaso Zulian chases his dream to the source, burning five weeks annual leave and twenty-three rolls of film in China and Hong Kong.
Photos: Tommaso Zulian.
You know the sort of travel where you're running at the equilibrium of exhaustion and fascination? This is it. Combining a photographic eye, steady hand, and prying mind, Tommaso documents China and Hong Kong extensively. Read on.
Between March and April this year, I spent five weeks travelling through China and Hong Kong. It was a trip I had been looking forward to for a long time, not only because of my fascination with China and its language, which I have been studying for over a year, but also because I knew I would have the opportunity to photograph it extensively.
Photography is always a fundamental part of the way I travel. Wherever I go, I tend to bring far too many cameras, and this trip was no exception. I travelled with my Nikon FE, my Olympus XA2, a Sony Handycam and my Fuji X-Pro2, although I ended up using the last one very little and documenting the experience almost entirely on film, as usual. I also bought a Yashica Samurai for very cheap in an antique shop in Shanghai and managed to break it almost immediately.
I shot 23 rolls of film throughout the trip, purely for leisure. Sometimes I think that one day I might get bored of photography, but clearly that hasn’t happened yet. The following are some of my favourite photographs from Hong Kong and mainland China. Together, they form a visual diary of my journey.
Hong Kong was particularly important to me photographically. I had been wanting to photograph the city for a long time. Hong Kong is busy and constantly moving. The city has a gritty, dense and cinematic character, with its neon signs, multi-storey buildings, shutters covered with graffiti and wheat-pasted posters.
It’s probably the most photogenic city I have ever been to and the perfect place to shoot at night. Night photography has become an increasingly important part of my photographic style in recent years. Knowing that, I brought with me a large supply of Cinestill and tried to shoot as much as possible after dark.
I was drawn to the neon lights, the rush of the city and the atmosphere of its streets, but I also wandered through quieter parts of the city during the day, looking for more intimate and ordinary moments of everyday life away from the chaos of the centre.
My days consisted of lots of walking and shooting, along with stopping at 7-Eleven corner shops and cha chaan tengs, trying local food and drinking iced lemon teas. The experience in mainland China was different. China is a continent full of cultures, so different from the West, and a perfect environment for photography. My time there was nowhere near enough to even scratch the surface of such an interesting and multi-faceted country, but it was enough to experience a mix of cities and remote places.
In the cities, hours would go by walking and shooting rolls of film, then stopping to enjoy weird local food and chatting with the locals, despite my relatively poor Mandarin. In remote villages, far away from mainstream tourist destinations, I was mainly interested in documenting everyday life, the people and the environments they lived in.
I enjoyed hiking through rice terraces and going to the craziest local markets I have ever seen, way more raw and unfiltered than anything I had encountered on previous trips to Southeast Asia. Stalls selling dog meat, countless types of insects being sold and eaten, and ethnic minority women dressed in traditional clothing.
Ultimately, this collection is both a record of a journey and a reflection of the way I experience places through photography. Travelling with cameras and film has become an essential part of how I explore the world. I don't simply photograph the places I visit; photography often shapes the way I see them in the first place.
These photos are therefore a personal diary of my trip through China and Hong Kong, a combination of my fascination with China, my love for film photography and my desire to document the people, places and moments I encountered along the way.
View more Hung Supply Magazine Photo Diaries here.
