Past Exhibitions / HK CITY VISION by Thierry Arensma

HK CITY VISION

The work proposed here was made in Hong Kong. It is a series of photographs shot with a large format camera on outdated Polaroid silver film, which is no longer manufactured since 2009. This film had the peculiarity of having a positive and a negative of an amazing quality. The importance of the choice of this type of film and its age is essential in the development, conceptualisation and finalisation of my work. Indeed, this film and the way I treat it allows me a unique and random rendering on each image. The chemistry (at the time of the almost immediate development of the polaroid negative) that I voluntarily let alter the negative, creates a trace, an identity of its own for each photo. I scan the negative of the polaroid when I consider that the whole, my own image and the traces of chemical destruction on the film melt together to the point that this whole gives the final image a new vision. The image thus obtained exists only at a moment in time because the original negative continues its course towards a definitive and irreversible destruction. We are immediately taken by the strength of this city but also by its nature. The energy that emanates from it is both intoxicating and overwhelming. I wanted to show the city of Hong Kong in the diversity of its architecture, both temporal and cultural-historical, and with the particularity of being inserted into a very powerful nature. I wanted to stay away from this very structured and purely architectural vision of HK that is conventionally shown. The photographic and aesthetic rendering is deliberately at odds with the modernity, the energy and the urban structuring of this great economic metropolis. The treatment I have developed reinforces this discrepancy and makes sense in the final rendering of the images. From this point of view the city of Hong Kong becomes at the same time obsolete, futuristic and poetic and gives the impression of hovering in a form of timelessness... -

Thierry Arensma Thierry Arensma lives and works in France.
He began his career as studio and commission photographer in 1985. He opened his first studio in 1990 and his commissioned work covers a wide range of photographic subjects: still life, architecture, reportage, portraits, publishing and advertising. At the same time, he develops personal work in different axes such as portraiture, still life of heteroclite objects found or sought, architecture and travel photography.