The Underexposed City

In his book Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, Ackbar Abbas considers the challenges of photographing the spaces of Hong Kong. He describes the post-colonial city as so "overexposed" as to be impossible to capture in photographs. Attempts to capture the city in photographs loop back and reference the flood of images already contained in the West's cultural imaginary of the "Orient" or "Hong Kong."

Most recently, Beijing has been subjected to a similar sort of overexposure, leading up to the Olympics. The term "Beijing fatigue" was noted in a recent Architectural Record commentary. The condition Abbas reveals, however, is in fact the underexposure that occurs due to the limitations of a Western gaze, overly laden with colonial and Orientalist history. The anonymous spatial conditions of such historically-charged cities are overlooked in favor of nearly ready-made Asian spectacles, whether so-called "traditional" or the spatial upheaval of new modernities.

As Abbas notes, photography can serve to evoke the city even though it may fail to define it. By photographing the anonymous, the banal, the everyday buildings that make up most of a city such as Beijing, the city begins to reappear from the spectacle of large spatial systems. The specificity of place begins to replace the totalizing assumptions of "foreign" or "exotic" space.