Evangelo Costadimas
Safe Distance
Shanghai Street Artspace, Yau Ma Tei
Reviewed 22 July, 2007
Capturing fast movement human activity became easier
– as is well known – with the development of fast-action SLR cameras
in the 1930s. The French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson quickly
saw the possibilities of the new technology and his pioneering street
photography work defined all the elements of what we now know as photojournalism.
Evangelo Costadimas, however, deliberating breaks
the rules by choosing a medium format camera to take a refreshing
series of photographs of people walking on the streets of Yau Ma Tei
and Mong Kok. The camera he has chosen gives both a high-resolution
‘look’ and a ‘grainy’ smudginess to his photographs due to the combined
movement of camera and subjects.
“Safe Distance” features the intimacy that people
openly and casually display on the street – we see lovers, couples
and friends intimately touching and the photographer offers the obvious:
embraces and hand-holding. However, it is the intimacy that strangers
– unknown to each other – innocently display between each other that
gives this exhibition such strength. The noise, jostling and madness
of crowded Mong Kok streets is unseen in Costadimas’ photographs –
what we do see is the small tracings of calmness and group understanding
that people need to sensibly display when they interact with strangers.
Likewise, the waiting photographer and his camera
are caught by the same need to interact with strangers (his subject).
The photographer is surrounded by an invisible distance (possibly
3 or 4 metres) that allows passing people to be unaware of the intentions
of his work – however, once a person crosses into the photographer’s
‘safe distance’, the photographer will be discovered and the self-consciousness
of his subjects will preclude any obvious personal and intimate behaviour.
- John Batten. |