LAURENCE ABERHART'S face may not be known to many passers-by in Macau, but his torso and legs protruding from underneath a black cloth attached to a 100-year-old camera became a regular sight on the streets last year.
For one month, the 51-year-old New Zealand photographer pounded the pavements of the former enclave, capturing images of Macau on eight-by-10 plates.
Aberhart deliberately chose the lesser-known scenes in Macau - old corner buildings on busy junctions, medical clinics, an antiquated shop run by an 87-year-old dentist - and in so doing, recorded the often decaying Chinese architecture that did not receive the same brush-up and attention as the Portuguese-Macanese buildings before the 1999 handover.
'Before the Portuguese left they put a lot of money into Portuguese buildings, but not a lot into Chinese ones. A lot of the buildings are in bad shape,' says Aberhart.
The result of hours of footwork is a collection of 61 prints that have captured Macau's crumbling architecture and old temples, as well as the cross between European and Chinese cultures and how they interface. They are on show in Aberhart's exhibition, Ghostwriting: Photographs Of Macau By Laurence Aberhart, at the Macau Museum of Art, and a selection of them are on display at the John Batten Gallery in Central.
'I had fantastic support from the Macau Museum of Art,' says Aberhart. 'The director, Ung Vai Meng, did a lot of footwork with me and the disturbing thing was he would sometimes want to show me a building and we would turn a corner and he would say, 'oh, it's gone, it was here a month or two ago'.'