Fan Ho did not photograph Hong Kong. He photographed the light that passed through it.
The distinction matters. The streets of Kowloon and Sheung Wan in the 1950s and 1960s were full of photographers. Fan Ho was the one who understood that the city’s narrow lanes and tall buildings were not a subject. They were a light delivery system. Everything that made Hong Kong visually distinctive – the density, the verticality, the compression of human life into tight spaces – was also a mechanism for producing light conditions that did not exist anywhere else in the world.
Shafts, Angles and the Architecture of Light
Hong Kong’s built environment in the postwar decades was a city of accidental light architecture. The lanes between buildings in Kowloon were narrow enough that the sun, at certain angles and certain hours, produced a shaft of direct light in an otherwise shadowed street. A person walking through that shaft was briefly, completely lit. Everything around them was dark.
Fan Ho knew where these shafts were. He knew what time of day they appeared, which direction they came from, and how long they lasted. This knowledge was not theoretical. It was the knowledge of someone who had walked the same streets for years, at different hours, watching what the light did.
The resulting photographs look like stage lighting, but they are not. They are the product of geometry – the angle of the sun, the width of the lane, the height of the buildings on either side – understood and waited for.
Shadow as Composition
Most photographers treat shadow as the absence of light. Fan Ho treated it as a material with weight and texture that could do compositional work equal to the lit areas of the frame.
In his photographs, the shadow is not where the photograph isn’t. The shadow is part of the photograph. A figure emerges from darkness into a triangle of light. The darkness is not empty – it has shape, edge, direction. It describes the space as precisely as the lit areas do.
This comes from working in a city where the ratio of shadow to light was extreme. In a narrow Hong Kong lane at midday, most of the street is in deep shadow. The light is a thin strip. To make photographs there, you have to learn to compose with both — to use the shadow as deliberately as you use the light.
Smoke, Steam and Diffusion
Fan Ho was drawn to conditions that complicated the light. Steam from street food stalls, smoke from incense burners, the haze that settled over the harbour in the early morning – these were not obstacles. They were diffusion tools that softened the edges of the light shafts and added atmosphere to what would otherwise have been a clean geometric exercise.
A shaft of light passing through a cloud of steam becomes something different to a shaft of light in clear air. The edges soften. The beam becomes visible. The photograph gains depth. Fan Ho understood this and positioned himself accordingly – at the angle and distance at which the steam or smoke was doing something useful to the light.
This is available everywhere. Every city has steam, smoke, dust, mist. The question is whether you are looking at it as an obstacle or as a material.
Three Questions Worth Asking Before You Go Out
Where does the built environment in your city produce concentrated, directional light? Fan Ho’s shafts came from the narrow lanes of Kowloon. Your city has its own version – a gap between buildings, an underpass that catches the morning sun, a courtyard that lights up for twenty minutes at dusk. Finding them requires walking at different hours, not searching online.
What is the ratio of shadow to light in the spaces you are working in, and are you composing with both? A photograph made in high-contrast conditions that ignores the shadow is using half the frame. Fan Ho used all of it.
What is in the air today, and what does it do to the light? Steam, dust, haze, mist – these change the quality of light passing through them. They are not problems to be avoided. They are conditions to be understood.
Using BYgo for Fan Ho Conditions
BYgo tracks shadow quality and light angle through the day – the information that Fan Ho was using intuitively when he positioned himself in a lane at a particular hour. If you search a dense urban city and BYgo returns high contrast conditions with hard shadows, that is Fan Ho’s working environment.
The brief will tell you when the contrast is highest and the shadows are hardest. In a city with narrow streets and tall buildings, those are the conditions that produce light shafts. The geometry of your city does the rest.
Further Reading
A Hong Kong Memoir and A Hong Kong Legend are the two essential collections. Both are published by Modernbook Editions and are worth tracking down in physical form – the tonal range of his prints does not survive compression well.
Part of the How They Saw It series – exploring how the photographers in BYgo’s shooting briefs thought about light, time, place, and conditions. Next: Saul Leiter on Geography.