Photographer’s snaps of 1970s Hong Kong given life 5 decades on by grandson he never met

During the Christmas holiday in 2021, Jack Smith discovered a collection of surgical equipment boxes in the garage of his childhood home near London. The boxes contained around 80,000 35mm film slides taken by his late grandfather Herbert Smith as he travelled around the world between 1945 and 1987, including to Hong Kong in 1979. “He passed away in 1987, so I never met [him], and those photos were left in a big box for about 30 years,” Smith, now 28, says. Those previously hidden photographs, stored in their original yellow Kodachrome I and II boxes, are now seeing the light of day. Smith has launched A Blank Wall, an archival website and photography platform to share his grandfather’s adventures. From now until May 18, Smith is selling framed copies of five of his grandfather’s Hong Kong photos. Titled “Streets of Neon: Hong Kong 1979”, this collection includes snapshots of the city’s hazy neon signs and sleek vintage cars. This comes after Smith previously released collections of photos from Canada and Japan. Around the globe, viewers have been charmed by the project’s nostalgic allure. Smith says that most of the buyers for this newest collection are from Hong Kong, but also include Britons who once lived and worked in the city. “I’ve been learning about all these places through these photos. I’ve never been to Hong Kong, and before I had no idea that many of these neon signs no longer exist,” Smith says. View this post on Instagram A post shared by A Blank Wall (@blankwall.uk) Choosing only five to showcase in this most recent print drop was difficult, and some of his personal favourites, including images of local fishermen, did not make the cut. “There’s an artistic difference between what is a good image and what people put on their walls,” he says. “But the beauty of those five prints is that I think they don’t just capture Hong Kong. They capture his trip in Hong Kong.” The full 80,000 slides include images from 40 countries, including Guatemala, Japan, Canada and Morocco. Of them, 65,000 images are colour, while the others are black and white. Smith’s grandfather started taking photos during secondary school and continued his hobby whilst studying to be a doctor, eventually becoming a fellow of the UK’s Royal Photographic Society. Piecing together bits of his father’s memories and photographic evidence, Smith concluded that his grandfather probably travelled to Hong Kong at the start of a larger tour around Asia funded by his work as a surgeon. “He would go on these long trips for a month or two at a time just to take photos,” Smith says. “I think he probably then went to India, Thailand, Bali, or to Singapore or Australia.” Smith, who works full-time in London’s music marketing industry, has always been interested in photography, but found dealing with his grandfather’s photos involved a steep learning curve. “At first, I didn’t even know how to handle the film. I didn’t know how to archive anything. I had to learn pretty quickly, because if you don’t handle the photography properly, it gets damaged, and there was already quite a lot of fungus and things like that that have been introduced to the film,” he says. Taking notes from some of the darkroom equipment that his grandfather left behind, Smith learned how to clean and preserve the vintage film. He essentially became the family’s archivist, also learning how to scan and digitise large amounts of the film in his studio. Luckily for him, his grandfather labelled and dated every single image. It is a time-consuming process, Smith says, adding that he even took a few years off work to travel and fully dedicate himself to these film photos – like grandfather, like grandson. Smith travelled around South America for three years, heading to the same countries that his grandfather did, and even going to the same locations to recreate the decades-old photographs. In Guatemala, he was surprised to see that not much had changed at all. “It was to the point where I was taking videos in 2025 and they were exactly the same as it was in 1980,” he laughs. But he imagines it would be the complete opposite if he came to Hong Kong, which is a bucket-list travel destination for him. “It would be amazing to come to Hong Kong and retrace some of my grandad’s footsteps,” he says. Smith is aware that he is not an expert on Hong Kong. However, he thinks that “the beauty of [the project] is just touching on some cultures around the world in a way that’s super visual and exciting … which then encourages people to do their own research or go learn about that period of time.” A Blank Wall has expanded into hosting small gallery exhibitions and selling prints at local markets; Smith even has a book in the works. But his ultimate dream with these photos is in artistic collaboration, whether that means lending the photos for use in art projects, working with music curators, or somehow linking the photos with the featured countries’ foods and traditions. Beyond that, Smith’s discovery of dusty boxes in a garage four years ago has led him on an odyssey of unearthing intergenerational lore, allowing him to “meet” a man that died before he was born. View this post on Instagram A post shared by A Blank Wall (@blankwall.uk) “I’ve got to know what he looked like and how he acted around his friends through the years from a young boy to an older person,” Smith says. “I’ve also got to see the relationship he had with my grandmother. “Taking a photograph is extremely personal. It showed me that he was extremely curious and very eager to learn about the world, which I think is one of the most important things you can be as a person – and that rubbed off on me.” A Blank Wall, “Streets of Neon: Hong Kong 1979”. Prints available until May 18, 7am HKT. For more information, visit A Blank Wall’s website.