Text by Nicholas Behrens
All Images © Pierfrancesco Celada
Pierfrancesco Celada (1979) is an Italian photographer and founder of the publishing house Muddyisland. After his studies, spent between Milan and England, he decides to focus on photography and moved to Japan, where his research on life in modern megalopolis begun. After that he moved to Hong Kong, where he lived until 2022, before going back to Italy. His work has been published internationally by magazines such as National Geographic, i-D and Financial Times, has won numerous awards and has been exhibited by several institutions including the Singapore International Photography Festival in 2024. With Muddyisland he has published Instagrampier (2021), One a day (2024) and his latest project When I feel down I take a train to the Happy Valley (2024).
In Hong Kong there is a tram that slides through the endless buildings. On the lighted sign on its face you can read its destination, “Happy Valley”, and immediately want to hop on it and get away. Away from the chaos, the crowd, the concrete, to get to that place which promises peace. Hong Kong is a city of contrasts: grey, but surrounded by green; crowded, but permeated by a sense of loneliness; imposing and claustrophobic, with the highest density of skyscrapers in the world, almost impermeable to sunlight. It is an ambiguous city due to its past, where East and West meet and collide, generating an identity crisis that persists to this day. Ten years ago, in September 2014, this crisis reached a peak, triggering the Umbrella revolution which, together with the 2019 protests and the Covid-19 pandemic, contributed to draw the image of a struggling city. When I feel down I take a train to the Happy Valley embraces this image and explores its contrasts, searching for those ways out, those happy places, that represent the other side of the city and that can give it back its complexity.
The project selects pictures from the material that Celada has produced during his eight-years stay in the city, exploring it shot after shot, day after day, looking for the visual metaphors that could translate the feelings the city gave him. A big part of these images comes from other projects, always connected to the city but more specific. “In the end I realised it was all coming back to the same box, they were different ways to see the same subject”. That is because Hong Kong is like a matrioska: when you think you know it, it is ready to surprise you with a new layer to decode. Among the photos of the serie, the first ones to be shot are those of the Revolution. “The protests began on September 29th and I moved on October 1st. I’ve spent the first month at one of the road intersections the protesters had occupied, shooting as much as I could […]”. But even documenting so closely, Celada does not give in to the temptation of detail, maintaining the necessary distance to place the event in the overall framework of a city that is dealing with itself. The width of the shots and the balance of visual weights transform the subject’s chaos and urgency in an organised disorder that seems to suspend real time to transport us to the one of storytelling.
“I knew that what I lived during the protests could not be the real city. What I discovered later was the image that I was expecting […]”: the one made of concrete, crowds and restrictions, but also of green, loneliness and escape. With about forty percent of the territory dedicated to natural re- serves and parks, Hong Kong’s urban fabric is marked by a strong vertical thrust which makes the city look like a concrete jungle. The most recent areas have been built around subway stations, buildings are often connected by underground tunnels and there are hubs where you can find public transport, malls and – above these – housing, all in the same place. These structures are de- signed in such a way as to make the outside superfluous, reducing the living space to another city, inside and under the city itself. The high density of dwellings and their small size lead people to look outside for places to make their own, getaways from the claustrophobia of concrete and the impressive flow of humanity that invades the streets of Hong Kong every day. These are places such as the Instagram Pier, technically an industrial area which therefore goes beyond the city’s rules of behaviour. Here walkways are not restricted, children can play and there are no particular prohibitions, making the pier a free zone where people can self-regulate and find their own place. More often, however, residents find their way out in the green areas around the town, crossed by a myriad of walkways and dotted with micro-interventions aimed at adapting the environment to human needs, converting natural spaces into extensions of the domestic one.
“I’ve lived in Hong Kong for eight years, but I’ve always known that sooner or later I would have gone away […]. I moved there with the idea of doing something, but it was the city to suggest me the structure of the project”. The pictures of the series evoke its contrasts with the delicacy of those who know what they are talking about without having the pretence of telling the truth, in an equation where the detachment of the images corresponds to their intensity. When I feel down I take a train to the Happy Valley narrates of a complex and multi-layered reality in a period that has deeply transformed its social, political and cultural face. But it is not on the events that caused this change that its shots focus on. The attention is for a feeling you breathe in the air, for the city’s most intimate nature, the one that only those who can wait without expecting anything are able to catch. What the photographs communicate is a sense of calm that induces reflection. What the architectures, gestures and colours of the pictures transmit is an emotional portrait that does not convey a single meaning, but along with time suspends judgement, inviting those who look at it to seek their own significance, as Hong Kong residents search for their own place.
BOOK DETAILS:
120 pages / 26 x 20 cm
67 photographs / Hardcover
Design: Pierfrancesco Celada
Layout: bruno, Venice
Image toning: Melissa Pallini
Printed at Grafiche Veneziane, Venice
Published by muddyisland
first edition, 2024
