Bob shows a now vanished Hong Kong, as the city starts to undergo one of the most rapid urban transformations seen in modern times.
Bob Davis first visited Hong Kong in 1970, and had never even seen a postcard of the place. When he got here, he was awestruck. He started to keep taking pictures of Hong Kong and eventually he settled in Hong Kong in 1978. At the time he simply captured images of what he saw around him, as he did wherever he went, and over time his Hong Kong pictures collectively became a peerless visual record of a city undergoing one of the most rapid and dramatic transformations of modern times.
These are images of a vanished world – vanished buildings, vanished trades, vanished ways of life. This is Hong Kong with a British garrison, four Union Jacks flying from the old Hong Kong Club, and a cricket pitch in the middle of Central. Davis continues to shoot Hong Kong, and to revisit sites now all but unrecognisable as those he saw with a fresh eye 40 years ago. Many of the locations pictured here have been captured again, from the same angle, and having this “then and now” diptychs.
About the Artist
Bob Davis was born in Melbourne in 1944 he made his first darkroom at the age of 12, he started his photographic career in the Department of Film Productions in Tasmania, by the mid 1960s, following a move to Sydney, he had established himself as an advertising and commercial Photographer. In 1970 he decided to relocate to London to work on more editorial and travel relates assignments, and to develop his own distinctive way of seeing and recording a wider world.
Davis first visited Hong Kong in the late 70s on assignment for the London Times which took him to Japan, he eventually divided his time between bases in London and Hong Kong traveling widely around Europe and Asia.
Over a five year period much of his creativity was focused on Japan, and his first book , Faces of Japan, was published in Tokyo in 1978. He eventually he settled in Hong Kong in 1978, and started the Stock House PhotoAgency in 1980.
