it's nice to look in the architecture magazines and see the rich people who have 5,000 square ft but that's not our reality I'm very interested in the everyday life of normal people and uh what they do and what traces they [Music] leave my name is Michael wolf I was born in Germany I worked for many years as a photojournalist and then in 1994 I moved to Hong Kong where I still live today from 1994 until 2003 I was spending six months out of the year in mainland China traveling all around doing various topics when SARS the bird flu came to Hong Kong it was April I think April 2003 a lot of people had died and my son came home from school and said you know Papa my best friend's father died yesterday and my wife just totally freaked out and said I'm not going to stay here any longer I'm going to go back to Germany and uh I suddenly realized oh my God I'd lived in Hong Kong for 9 years and I'd never photographed the city and I felt so guilty living in this incredible Mega City and I never photographed it because I was always busy with my job and then i' come back to Hong Kong and then I'd edit it and then I'd go on to the next job um and that was a wonderful time I wasn't afraid of SARS everything was very very muted everyone had masks over their faces um but didn't bother me and I went out every morning at 6:00 and walked the city really from 6:00 until 6:00 in the evening and then I'd bring my films to the lab and I slowly um developed my own vision of Hong Kong the architecture of density if you look at the photographs they all have a a certain stylistic device that you do not see the Horizon and you do not see the sky you do not have an idea how big it is it could be five times as big or 20 times as big or 100 times as big so I suddenly had created a metaphor for mega cities is a monstrous immen buildings these repeating patterns and when you looked at them you would see little pieces of clothes and things on the windows and you would imagine these hundreds or thousands of Windows and behind every window there's a family or a human being and how do they [Music] live I mean the streets of Hong Kong are incredibly busy but as soon as you go into a back alley it's absolute quiet and um in any other city in the world Berlin New York sou Paulo I would never go into a back alley because they're always they have this feeling of danger you know people can hide there and you might get robbed but in Hong Kong I never had that feeling it was basically an area where the workers the common people store their tools and all the kitchens had exits to the back so people were washing the vegetables or the women with the carts would park their carts there and for me the back alleys became my favorite way of walking through Hong Kong and the more I walked the more I discovered different categories mops and gloves and covered carts there's so many ways to dry them upop you know you can hang it you can jam it you can throw it over a rope and there'll be a glove flapping or you'll have an umbrella which is on the on the wall and the wind will come and it will look like like a jellyfish I started in 2003 and I photographed 3 days ago and every time I go there I always find something which I haven't seen before even after 13 years people have always ask me why don't you photograph the people in the back alleys and I said not necessarily I think the things that they use and the traces that they leave reveal much more about the people in the back alley so um I started collecting things when I saw something very interesting uh I have a huge collection of chairs for instance over 100 um and I would always make a deal I would always offer the money usually offer them $500 Hong Kong dollars it's an enormous amount of money um but for me you know it could be worth a 100,000 and the government has already done a test run uh a test cleansing of I think 13 back alleys which are now totally sterile there's nothing one of the things photography is really really well suited for is documenting things I see it a bit as my mission to document things in Hong Kong which are Vanishing which are disappearing primarily through urban renewal [Music]