Recently clearing out my Hong Kong flat as my wife and I are empty nesters (our three children now all in the UK), I came across a large plastic bag filled with negatives, around 50 of them, tightly rolled and wrapped in thin tissue paper. The contents of the bag had not seen the light of day since I pressed the shutter of my camera in the heady summer of 1986, when I lived in Beijing and also travelled by steam locomotive to the city of Datong, Shanxi province, famous for the fourth- and fifth-century Yungang Buddhist caves.
The camera, a 1960s Shanghai-manufactured Seagull, is a replica of the twin-lens periscope camera used by Chicago-based Vivian Maier, who evidently – like me – found satisfaction in simply pressing the shutter on that eternal moment expressed so poetically by the patron saint of street photographers, Mr Cartier-Bresson. Mine was bought with every spare yuan I had from a pawn shop on Wangfujing, Beijing’s Oxford Street. It cost Rmb100, a week’s wages, earned as a junior teacher at Beijing Shifan Daxue (Beijing Normal University), which specialised in teacher training. The camera did not come with a light meter and had no instructions.
Fortunately, I was young and unattached and time seemed abundant – as did 120 black-and-white film – and darkroom development was cheap. A recent graduate from Leeds University, I had spent the past four months teaching spoken English at Beishida (as the university is known) and working for the Newsweek bureau, while staying with a retired Chinese couple in Zhongguancun, the intellectual quarter of north Beijing. The area was later to become the city’s Silicon Valley. At that time it had a single telephone, sitting black, majestic and unused on the shelf of the local grocery shop.