The late German photographer Michael Wolf’s work was wide ranging. He documented shanzai painters in Shenzhen (Real Fake Art), rush hour commuters in Japan (Tokyo Compression) and the architecture of Chicago at dusk (The Transparent City); he even made a project of photographing scenes from Google Street View (A Series of Unfortunate Events), which irritated a number of other photojournalists when he won a prize at the World Press Photo competition for the series.
But some of Wolf’s most memorable work was focused on Hong Kong, the city he called home for 25 years. This includes Architecture of Density, a series that depicted Hong Kong’s high-rise housing estates as endlessly repetitive architectural abstractions, and 100×100, a 2006 series that documented the last remaining residents of the original Shek Kip Mei resettlement estate before its demolition the following year. His 2011 book on corner buildings anticipated their widespread redevelopment by several years.
Wolf produced so much work about Hong Kong that much of it flew under the radar — including the 2016 book Informal Solutions: Observations in Hong Kong Back Alleys, which was published three years before Wolf’s unexpected death at the age of 64. But it’s often these less renowned collections of photographs that say the most about Hong Kong, its urban environment and the people who shape it.
Informal Solutions brings together hundreds of photos documenting the traces of human activity in Hong Kong’s narrow lanes. There is a quiet poetry to these interventions. The cover of the book is a case in point. At first glance, it looks like colourful ribbons tied to a drainage pipe on the back end of a mildewy concrete building. A touch of festive whimsy? Not exactly: closer inspection reveals the ribbons to be the nylon strings that back alley workers — delivery people, street sweepers and the like — use to affix goods to their metal push carts.
The book is a celebration of seemingly mundane objects and scenes that speak to the improvisational genius that shapes Hong Kong’s urban environment. From its very beginnings as a city — which is to say when the British first colonised Hong Kong Island in 1841 — Hong Kong was intended as a place to make money; everything else was secondary. This was reflected in its urban planning, which imposed the most minimal concessions for livability on a landscape that was exploited to its full commercial potential.
Hong Kong’s alleyways are an example of this. In the early decades of colonial rule, Hong Kong’s urban development was largely unregulated, resulting in a packed landscape of fetid tenements home to a mushrooming population of Chinese workers. After the devastating bubonic plague of 1894, the government began to resurvey districts to improve ventilation, drainage and the removal of human waste, which at the time was euphemistically referred to as nightsoil.
Back alleys were a key feature of these urban planning reforms. Though Hong Kong’s ever-increasing density has made previously adequate alleys feel cramped — many are no more than two metres wide — they still serve an essential function, allowing ground-floor businesses to receive deliveries and dispose of waste without burdening the already overcrowded footpaths out front. Nightsoil may be a thing of the past, but alleys still reveal the underbelly of everyday life: air conditioners, ventilation ducts, plastic barrels full of mysterious liquids.
And of course, there’s everything that Wolf so keenly documented. His book begins with a large section of full- and double-page photos depicting barbed wire, overturned baskets, water pipes, discarded cigarette packets and all the other detritus normally found in a back alley. But there are also signs of the grassroots inventiveness that makes Hong Kong so compelling. Several photos record footwear — flip flops, leather shoes, waterproof boots — cleverly arranged on drainage pipes to keep them clear of the ground. In one photo, an array of water pipes are used as a drying rack for plastic bowls and takeaway containers, presumably used by workers for their meals.
This is followed by an insightful essay by architectural conservationists Lynne DiStefano and Lee Ho-yin explaining the history and significance of Hong Kong alleyways. After this, Wolf gets down to business: more than a hundred pages of photos arranged in a four-by-four grid, organised thematically. A section titled Drips consists of many plastic buckets and jugs filled with water, either collecting it from leaky pipes or saving it for cleaning. Flora is a delightful arrangement of all the different ways Hongkongers have greened their alleys, either by putting potted plants on the ground or growing cuttings in plastic bottles suspended from pipes. Hangers reveals how a simple household implement can transform even a blank wall into an outdoor cabinet.
Though Informal Solutions is nearly a decade old, its images are as relevant as ever. And that’s because Hong Kong’s fundamental urban logic is one of improvisation. In a sometimes harsh environment designed not for human comfort but for commercial potential and administrative efficiency, it’s the bottom-up efforts of ordinary people that make the city a place that actually works for its residents.
Informal Solutions: Observations in Hong Kong Back Alleys is published by WE Press Company.