Brachet offers a few advices for Lomo peoples in Hong Kong. “Always go for colours. They teach you to rediscover Hong Kong, to rediscover smell. You can take great pictures of trams; of MTR (underground railway in Hong Kong); of a wet market with bad smell. Hong Kong people are not so shy anymore. They’re comfortable with loving photography now.”

“And my other advice would be – go to the lab. In terms of the duration of exposure, instead of spending two seconds to print the picture, you allow the negative to expose for four seconds. The result is more contrastive and it looks much better. Only if you print the photographs one by one, you can get good pictures. If you print the whole roll of film automatically, the average exposure of each picture maybe one-second only. Then you’ll get underexposed pictures,” he goes on, “black is black, red is red, I am not going to pay if you give me grey.” For film development, Brachet recommends small family lab. “I don’t want Lomo people to give their money to big chains. They don’t need it. They don’t even give you good service. Stay with small family labs, they are professional. I always recommend good labs in Lomo websites.” So, if you know any good lab around your area, do not hesitate to drop Brachet an e-mail. It very important for Lomo people to know where to go for good prints.

Last year, Lomo Asia invited New York based French Graffiti artist WK Interact to exhibition in Japan, he also painted a truck with his trademark graphics, that truck went around Tokyo city for months. The project was so well received that WK has published a book there.

What is the possibility for projects like this to be held in Hong Kong? Brachet says, “First, the walls that we can use for graffiti are situated in abandoned areas, no body is going down to look at them. Of course, we can decorate a shop with graffiti, but that’s not what Lomo’s going to do. It has to be something shocking, something really special.”

Brachet thinks that it’s difficult to find a right angle to initiate a project here. “In Singapore, you just have to speak the language of the government, then you can do whatever you want. We said something like, ‘promoting better understanding of humanity… blah blah blah. They did approve at the end. For Hong Kong, I am not too sure what the right angle is.”

“We’d love to paint a tram. Now we’re getting more established in Hong Kong, maybe we can speak to them (tram company).” Let’s hope that this project will be realised very soon.

Side B Positive Exhibition
Date: January 26th – February 8th, 2002
Place: Institute of Matter
Address: 2/F, 33 Yiu Wa Street, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong
Tel: +86 852 2832 7894
https://www.instituteofmatter.com