Hong Kong's first public housing estate was born from disaster. It was built to provide shelter for 50,000 people left homeless after a fire swept through the Shek Kip Mei squatter camp in 1953. Having served the community for more than half a century, the final 15 blocks of the Shek Kip Mei Estate will be demolished in the coming weeks to make way for new development. The few remaining residents will shut their front doors for the final time today.
Photographer Michael Wolf, who trained in Germany and has been based in Hong Kong for the past 12 years, has encapsulated the spirit that evolved in Shek Kip Mei over the years in an ambitious project: 100x100. Where others saw run-down, ill-maintained buildings, Wolf saw a rare beauty.
'A lot of people won't pay attention to the architecture of these housing projects, treating them like buildings that lack the character of, say, 'historical' buildings in Hong Kong,' Wolf says. 'But from a distance, the repetitive nature of block after block that look so plain and exactly the same appears almost abstract. It's a particular aesthetic that is unique to Hong Kong.'
The exterior, however, was nothing compared with what he found inside the estate: a bustling, lively community he felt compelled to capture. 'I've been walking all over Hong Kong, just looking at things, and two years ago, I passed by Shek Kip Mei. When I was told in April they were going to vacate this estate, I immediately went back,' he says. 'What fascinated me was that each unit was roughly 10 foot by 10 foot, or a 100 square feet, and the way the residents used this limited amount of space. Each unit had a very distinct personality that reflected the lives of an individual, an elderly couple or a family.'
To capture what he saw, Wolf decided to shoot the occupants of 100 units. 'I thought about how people can live in such dense places and I knew I needed to do this before it disappeared,' he says. 'Foreign people have a perception Hong Kong is such a wealthy city - and we have places like this. For them, it's both horrifying and fascinating. Photography is more than just an art form. I want to be a real-time witness of an era of Hong Kong's history.'
Time was tight because residents were preparing to leave, so Wolf allowed himself three days to complete the project. He enlisted the help of a social worker whose office was located within the estate. 'I had wanted to hit as many homes as possible and I needed her help. Chan Chung-yee agreed to go door to door with me to explain to the residents what I was trying to do and to persuade them to let me take a portrait of each of them in their unit,' he says. 'I always took from the same angle, so each shot looks vaguely [similar], yet the composition is different as their spaces were so individualistic.'