Essays about...: Homely Spaces (Anthony W. Lee)

Homely Spaces

(of Desultory Landscapes)

Anthony W. Lee

A damp shirt hung out to dry, foam padding wrapped around leaky pipes, potted flowers tucked into the edges of stoops and walkways, plastic liter bottles filled with water and lined up on the pavement—in an old neighborhood the signs of human presence are everywhere. We do not need to see the inhabitants of the place to know they are close by. They have left their marks at every turn, remaking the streets and sidewalks with their daily routines. Even at night, maybe especially at night when the alleys and walkways are empty and lit unevenly by small overhead lamps, the sense of human activity is strong. The eerie yellow glow spotlights trash bags on the corner, or a lumpy and stained mattress that has been discarded on the sidewalk, or the rubbish piled high in the shadows. Empty buckets are overturned here and there. A broken clothes rack lies on the ground. The darkness secretes flesh and blood.

Older, crowded neighborhoods are very often like this. That is partly what gives them their picturesque charm, as if some pre-modern set of social behaviors can be glimpsed in the makeshift and mostly unorthodox handling of the modern streets. Every modern city has had such places and practices, and most have had photographers who have been drawn to them and given them form. Turn-of-the-century Paris had Atget. 1930s New York had Berenice Abbott. Post-war London had Bill Brandt. The pressures and contradictions of modernity have very often seemed most visible in the old neighborhoods of these cities, as anonymous men and women—young, old, sometimes poor, but very often hard-working middle class—tried to make homes for themselves amidst an expanding but frequently featureless and uninviting cityscape.

As cities like Hong Kong renew themselves by clearing older residences and replacing them with chic high rise apartments, compounds like those in Upper Kai Yuen Lane, where Wei Leng Tay has lived and photographed, obtain a gritty aura around them. The physical spaces of these neighborhoods are used by their residents in the most concocted and anarchic manner. The inhabitants use and re-use castaway items to mend broken things, to substitute one ill-fitting fixture for another, to decorate the cracked walls cheaply and colorfully, to identify themselves through their rearrangement of material culture, or simply to squirrel away the leftovers of some once-desirable thing—an old rice pot, sheets of corrugated steel, tattered fishing nets—for some unimaginable future need. They take over public spaces, transforming fences into laundry lines, haphazardly leaving their belongings here and there, and allowing their clutter to spill out into the courtyards and streets. In the older neighborhoods, the people make do.

Should we celebrate these places? Should we see them as signs of a different kind of communal life and pattern of social relations, as the inhabitants, inured by the tight spaces of the city, have found other ways to exist with each other? By the time you see Wei Leng Tay’s photographs, those questions will have become more pronounced. Earlier this year, the residents agreed to sell the entire building to a local developer. The compound on Upper Kai Yuen Lane is being emptied and will soon await the bulldozer. Like the old neighborhood, the photographs, full of the vestiges of human endeavor, will be all that remain.

Anthony W. Lee teaches art history at Mount Holyoke College. His recent books include Diane Arbus: Family Albums and Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco, for which he won the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art. He is the editor of the acclaimed series Defining Moments in American Photography.