European Soliloquy
by Sara Tin
Asia One, HK$175
Writing in the foreword to Sara Tin's book of photographic recollections of her travels through Europe, James Kenny, an associate professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, compares travelling with dreaming. He asks whether life is a journey or a dream and suggests that for an artist it is often both. 'If every journey begins, as the sage suggests, with a single step,' he writes, 'then Sara's journey begins with a single photograph. Her photographs are a visual diary of her journey.'
Tin, who lists her interests other than photography as Chinese literature, European culture and contemporary dance, studied journalism at the Chinese University before setting off to study arts and intercultural studies in Britain. During this period she 'wandered through Europe to capture poetic beauty', as she puts it.
Her journey took her through 20 cities and European Soliloquy - A Memory in Glass includes travel memoirs and observations in prose and poetry in Chinese and English. Many of the photographs carry captions that are more evocative than descriptive. A shot of a graffiti-covered bench in Budapest, for example, is saved from being an example of the neophyte photographer's cliche by a poetic caption: Waiting is the description, followed by 'An on/off relationship was a bigger torture than loneliness'. A picture of the London Underground, titled Frozen in Time, offers the chance for self-reflection: 'I love the contrast between motion and stillness. If only I could revisit my past, frozen in time, and take out what have become the biggest regrets of my life,' she writes.