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Hinge, Vol 157, September 2008: [frame]
Palimpsest: A Glimpse Through Hong Kong
For those of us who live in Hong Kong the city’s frenetic, hustle-bustle character has probably become second nature; for first-time visitors, however, the vibrancy of the streets overpowers like the smell of durian. Australian photographer Nick Gleitzman, who first visited Hong Kong and China in July 2007, describes it as “a visual feast of the exotic”. His latest exhibition, Palimpsest, staged at The Rotunda, Exchange Square last July, was the result of scampering around Hong Kong with camera, tripod and bag in hand one hot, humid week during tht first visit in 2007.
Gleitzman began his career as a commercial and advertising photographer in Australia. For over twenty years, he clicked away for some of the country’s top advertising agencies, while documenting the territory’s natural landscape in a personal capacity. Palimpsest, the title of Gleitzman’s exhibition, refers to “something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface”. The collection of 60 images, each soaked with colour and texture, captures the rapid life-cycle of Hong Kong’s urban environment. Whether engaged in a push-and-shove struggle with inner city crowds or hiking on Lantau Island, the impermanence of Hong Kong’s landscape is always evident in the peeling building facades or half-torn posters and notices adorning them. It is this layered history, this sense of a past somehow lost in the speed-obsessed workings of the modern metropolis, that Gleitzman is most interested in. Having always been fascinated with Asian visual art and graphic design, he likens the process of creating this particular series of photographs to found art, saying, “I very rarely get up in the morning, go out with a camera and say ‘Today, I’m going to take photographs.’ That’s why I carry a camera with me all the time, because I never know when the right thing is going to appear. It’s like a backwards, reverse process. I’m recording things already there. I don’t find the work; rather, the work finds me and I just have to be ready.”
Of course, Gleitzman admits his 20+ years behind the camera have trained his eye and mind to see what most people would simply bypass without noticing. “In commercial photography, every single element in that photograph is under your control,” he says. “This is a far more organic process. Shots were very spontaneous. Because I don't undertsand Chinese, I’m not bombarded with signals. I can really look at and respond to the design elements of the landscape.” His approach towards this collection, keeping pure visuals and meaning separate, may explain the abstract quality of this body of work. Treading a delicate line between painting and photography, the images, some of leftover paint or half-faded engravings, preserve evidence of past inhabitants and their marks on an ever-changing environment. In that respect, Gleitzman draws a parallel to his experience in landscape photography. “Each photograph is a fingerprint in time, whether shooting the natural landscape or the urban landscape. If you go into a national park to take photographs, you go back one week later and the plant has grown a little bit or it’s died or a log has fallen. The changes might be microscopic, but it’s not the same. It’s a similar phenomenon with our urban environment.”
That the final product should begin to blur the lines between photography, painting and other printmaking techniques was completely unintentional, though Gleitzman says he is very satisfied with the outcome. He used Photoshop to intensify the colours and contrast for each image, creating a vignette effect that seems to heighten the transient nature of the photographed subject. The pictures were then printed using state-of-the-art inkjet technology on watercolour paper, furthering their hand made quality. Ultimately, Gleitzman believes that regardless of the process, “the final product hanging up on the wall is just a print.” How he got there doesn’t really matter.
What does matter is that Gleitzman’s work makes people think. “Don’t care if they don’t like it. Prefer that they like it. The worst thing is indifference.” Gleitzman’s passion for photography and design is nevertheless more than apparent in his work. “Making photographs as an element of a broader design is something that I’ve always done,” he says of his experience in commercial photography. In his first Hong Kong exhibition, however, Gleitzman has managed to incorporate that element of design back into his photographs.
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