望遠鏡 (Telescope)
Publication 6 x 6 cm
86 pages
2022
‘The view of reality, as an exotic prize to be tracked down and captured by the diligent hunter-with-a-camera has informed photography from the beginning, and marks the confluence of the Surrealist counter-culture and middle-class social adventurism. Photography has always been fascinated by social heights and lower depths. [...]For more than a century, photographers have been hovering about the oppressed, in attendance at scenes of violence - with spectacularly good conscience. Social misery has inspired the comfortably-off with the urge to take pictures, the gentlest of predations, in order to document a hidden reality, that is, a reality hidden from them.’
- Susan Sontag, on Photography.
望遠鏡 (translated as Telescope) is a publication borrowing from Susan Sontag’s reflection on photography and transferring its logic onto the white gaze. Tackling this phenomenon, Amandine Vabre Chau reappropriates and decenters this voyeuristic tendency embodied by white expats in foreign cities. Playfully mimicking the fetish they demonstrate in frantically taking pictures of locals, this publication instead shows the expat as the exotic subject. The people captured on the page can’t return the onlooker’s gaze and are condemned to stare inwards, either at themselves, the spine of the book or at the palm of the reader; until a confrontation with the beholder is staged, even as they are unable to escape the literal hold of the viewer. All pictures were taken in Hong Kong.
