The most surprising thing about a collection of photographs about 1997 is how little it appears to be about 1997. Thirty-one local photographers have participated in the project The Metropolis which opens at the Arts Centre today. In 1990 they were invited by the show's curator, Oscar Ho, to start taking photographs which they thought were relevant to the theme of the handover. This show, Phase 1, is intended to assess the run-up to Hong Kong's critical year, while Phase 2, scheduled to be displayed in 18 months' time, will be an exploration of 1997 itself. Among the 130 photographs on display there are pictures of harbour construction works, Chinese opera rehearsals, and grannies cooking up meals on a single stove in a public housing flat. The emphasis is more on the inner, human side of changing times, rather than on the outward symbolism of 'the handover'. There are some where the symbolism is clear: moving men with ladders shift around heavy pictures of the Hong Kong harbour; a man looks down onto empty, rainy Lan Kwai Fong streets - normally busy, but looking ominously desolate; silhouettes are shown of people behind a tent near the Legislative Council building; a man walks up a staircase towards a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II. The title of that one is The Fading Image. But most are about Hong Kong people doing Hong Kong people kind of things. There are triad boys looking muscly, and little boys looking lost; there are glamorous people partying in a chic restaurant, and kids playing football with a dog, in front of a half-completed Tsing Ma bridge. 'There isn't that much documentation of incidents and politics,' Ho said. 'Instead of photographing the people queuing for BN(O) passports for example, the artists preferred to give a more personal view of Hong Kong today,' he said. 'It is strange. The art school theorists would say that something dramatic like the transition should stir immediate artistic response. 'But it doesn't seem to have done so. The artists have tended to be much more interested in people than in politics.' The Metropolis is on show in the Pao Galleries, Hong Kong Arts Centre, until August 12
