Hong Kong by Mikko Takkunen

Hong Kong

By Mikko Takkunen

Kehrer, 2024

“Never trust the artist. Trust the tale,” D. H. Lawrence famously said. In a brief Afterword to his wonderful photobook entitled Hong Kong, Mikko Takkunen writes about documenting the city he was leaving after five years. Though an experienced photography critic, Geoff Dyer in his Introduction trusts Takkunen and writes hundreds of throat-clearing words about the artist’s documentary precursors. Definitely don’t trust the artist when he goes big with his title, perhaps to solicit readers unlikely to buy a more accurate title such as Unexpected, Original, and Obscured Photographs of a City Known as Hong Kong. That comes closer to Takkunen’s tale.

In the 95 pages and 68 color photographs in Hong Kong, there is near the end one expected, familiar, and unobstructed shot of a street thick with skyscrapers and people, though even this photograph has a series of light poles cutting up and slightly obscuring the scene, a device often used by Lee Friedlander in his recently published Lee Friedlander Framed. Dyer rightfully name checks famous photo colorists—William Eggleston, Saul Leiter, Alex Webb—but it’s not Takkunen’s use of color (and high contrast black) that makes his photographs fascinating. It’s his unique perspectives and inventive framing, often combined.

All photographs frame the world. When Takkunen includes a frame or frames within the frame of the photograph, no matter what it may document the image becomes a metaphotograph, as much about “how” the photograph is taken as about Dyer’s “what” is being taken. How Takkunen shoots unexpected particulars in a city that would seem to overwhelm them indicates how he thinks and feels about his dense locale.

Though not one of Takkunen’s most compelling photographs, his cover image of two people is both multiply framed and obscured, it appears, by rain on glass. Once the viewer recognizes the “how,” the viewer can move on to “why?” Pure documentary photos of the kind that Dyer references--images that want the viewer to forget the photographer--disappear once their information enters memory. Takkunen’s photographs remain there on the page, giving the viewer qualities to wonder about and appreciate each time the viewer opens the book. I don’t want to be a spoiler of Takkunen’s “tale,” so come back to “why?” that cover photo after you’ve seen all of the book.

There are people in Hong Kong, though maybe not as many as you might expect or anticipate from the cover. Takkunen includes a few couples, but almost always his people are alone, usually seen from a great distance, their faces averted or hidden or masked. There is one unrevealing closeup: the back of a man’s head on a ferry. Takkunen’s Hong Kong is not an easy place to live. None of his individuals can compete in size or beauty with the advertising images that Takkunen sprinkles through the book. In this regard, Hong Kong is similar to Anastasia Samoylova’s Image Cities in which global images plastered on buildings and screens menace local individuality.

Takkunen was passing through Hong Kong. So are his people, on the move, walking, riding in trams or ferries. But Takkunen is less interested in action than in the spaces that the residents pass or look through, the physical frames of the vertical environment they and he must negotiate: they to make a living, he to make photographs. He is fond of radically contrasting the maximal scale of the city and the minimal scale of any one person’s perspective and perception.

The most dramatic of these contrasts is a view from a boat of seawater and high buildings. Takkunen frames these Hong Kong icons within an opening surrounded by ugly pipes, rope, and a striped bar:

In another view of those icons, the scene is shot through a partly open dirty window that frames the conventional view with vertical and horizontal black lines as ugly as the pipes in the other water view. Takkunen might not claim this kind of framing—a combination of what and how we see—is the true documentation, but I will. A photo editor for the New York Times, Takkunen is a humble artist, but he can’t be trusted. His photographs are much more artful and thoughtful than he lets on in his Afterword.

Rarely in life do we have the unobstructed views that travel photos show us. Takkunen repeatedly employs the internal, disruptive frames Friedlander included for cognitive and aesthetic dissonance. Takkunen shoots the inside of a restaurant through filmy glass doors that meet to form a solid, obstructing vertical line in the middle of the image. He reverses the technique in another photo, shooting a sailboat through a narrow opening berween gauzy curtains.

The most radical example of obstruction as a strategy of resistance to immediate consumption of his photographs is Takkunen’s image of half a bicycle crossing iconic yellow walk lines, an image in which an awning takes up about three-fourths of the frame. This can only be an homage to Saul Leiter’s “Canopy,” a black and white photo similarly obstructed by an awning--an homage but also a topping, for people can be seen at the bottom of Leiter’s photograph while Takkunen’s shows only the bike rider’s legs. “Photorealism” is a figurative term applied to painting. In Takkunen’s images, the term is literally true: photographs glimpse as we often do in real life.

Takkunen has said he loved living in Hong Kong, but nearly all of his photographs are quite unromantic, beautiful in their imaginative composition but not in their subjects. What Takkunen does seem to have loved are the photographic possibilities the city’s verticality and density created, their demand for unusual perspectives and their offers of elaborate framing. By taking advantage of these possibilities, Takkunen has presented a highly individual alternative to promotional Hong Kong. One image, more explicit than most, perhaps too explicit, shoots the high island city through a tangle of barbed wire.

For the viewer who has wandered into Hong Kong, thinking it’s a conventional travel book, Takkunen often pairs photographs on opposite pages, a way to imply why he takes photographs how he does. What looks to be a workingman sits on steps looking, perhaps dejectedly, at his feet. On the facing page, a man lies under his car, presumably repairing it. Move ahead a few pages and find another pairing. One woman, whose face we can’t see, is walking into the dark. On the opposite page, a woman is running into the dark. Hong Kong may be the banking center of Asia, but Takkunen suspects this romance of male-dominated wealth and hunts doubled scenes that belie it.

When viewing Takkunen, look upward. A bare-chested man carrying food walks through a street; way above him in the right corner of the image is “Tiffany & Co.” A photograph of two men high above the street and gripping a bamboo scaffolding is also anti-romantic. One of the men looks even higher up, but he won’t be working in or living in the skyscraper he is building. He and his partner do, though, offer a scene any photographer would love; the multiple frames of the scaffolding suggest an elaborate elevated cage.

I’ve identified a few photographs that I think represent Takkunen’s sophisticated, double documentation of scene and shot. You will find many more, scores of images to enjoy wondering about, as well as some that will immediately appeal with their peculiarities and, yes, their vivid colors. One early shot of hanging red lanterns against a colonial facade is undeniably beautiful, maybe even romantic and possibly clichéd, perhaps intentionally to suggest what Takkunen doesn’t do in Hong Kong.

Takkunen is not playing hide and seek. He’s an artist who knows we often see through frames—physical or epistemic, metal or mental--that may affect us more than we realize and, once recognized, may change our intellectual and emotional responses to photographs and to the world. Metaphotographs like Takkunen’s can make us meta-seers. That’s the belief that underlies his “tale” of scale.

Finally, an admission: I have never been to Hong Kong. But I will visit Hong Kong again and again. Since I’m a critic here, not an artist, you can trust me on that.

Tom LeClair’s most recent novel, Passing Again, is a hybrid of memoir, fiction, and photographs.