One of my strangest trips has been to HongKong. Why? Having just moved to India at the time, there was no apparent reason to go there. I had no connection to HongKong whatsoever. Wasn´t India full of mysteries waiting to be discovered? Yes, but it was also clear that I´d be travelling to other Asian countries, taking a time out from bustling India once in a while. HongKong was the furthest east I would concede to traveling from my Indian base, whitout drifting too far from a certain point of reference. Maybe my decision had been to tackle the furthest potential destination first, thinking that perhaps later on I would lack ambition to do so. And I always did have a vague plan to go to HongKong before the British handover to China. So, there you go. Another reason for the strangeness of the trip was the fact that I traveled by myself. I wasn´t used to making discoveries alone. Normally there´d always be somebody I travelled with, or I´d meet some friends along the way somewhere. So, here I was by myself in a totally strange land, a civilization unknown but the food that I had partly known since my early childhood (from my first Indian years in the seventies). Then I thought of an acquaintance from previous years that I knew could be in HongKong, and after localizing her place of work, I managed to meet her along with some friends of hers. One of them was a really nice guy who happened to have some time to spare. That was really convenient, as I was then shown around by a "local" with some interesting insider knowledge of HongKong Island.

As it happened I almost didn´t bring along a camera. Another really strange thing was, that for a few years in the nineties, I had a really weird phase of not photographing. Or at least not very much. Wether travelling or just by artistic ambition, there was nothing to be done, for a while I thought I´d lost interest in one of my great and longlasting hobbies. Not a lot of pictures between `94 and `97. And in fact there very unfortunately was one beautiful trip that I´d done completely without a camera. It was the most exotic and mysterious country I had travelled to hitherto: Myanmar, the former Burma (heaven knows what spirit possessed me at the time). Point being that I had a camera with me in HongKong, but I was somewhat uninspired. A fact that can be seen in the pictures as they didn´t come out at all; and mind you, these are sadly my best pictures of that trip. To my defense I also have to say that my slides have taken some damage in the course of time, especially in the tropical climates of Calcutta and Accra. This is true for all my slides and most of the pictures from the Rückblende-series.

A very classic view towards northeast (Mainland China in the background),

looking from a mid-level point somewhere below Victoria Peak.

Crazy canyons between high-rises which are built up the slope. Some of these houses are interconnected at a lower level,

and some share a mid level outdoor pool and tennis area. Narrow space develops ideas.

The higher up, the wealthier? In HongKong most probably.

View from my room on the Kowloon side.

The not so legendary looking legend: The original Mandarin Hotel (square building on the right), now the Mandarin Oriental.

Nowadays all these views look completely different, as land reclamation has progressed and real estate has doubled.

HongKong is one of those cities that changes it´s face every few years.