Ding a Ling

There’s never been a coffee table book dedicated solely to Hong Kong’s trams, those charmingly old-world “Ding Dings” in a city that holds the record for the planet’s largest double-decker stree nd the grit of Wan Chai, to the old trams themselves, to passengers of all sorts and especially the advertising on them. It’s all captured wittily on camera, courtesy of Morgan Ommer and Yvon Choi.

“It’s life on Hong Kong Island from the trams’ point of view,” explains Ommer, who waited for an hour at a North Point wet market for the tram to roll over for that one perfect shot. 80 percent of the photographs are taken by Ommer, but the book is really the brainchild of Choi, who studied engineering and loves the technical aspect of railways. “It’s like grownup boys’ toys,” he says. Ever since he moved to Hong Kong a decade ago, the Bangkok-bred, France-educated Korean has been fascinated by our city’s trams; for five years, he’s been snapping pictures of the Ding Ding. “As an amateur photographer with a day job that requires me to sit in front of the computer tracking financial markets, I could see no way for me to do a whole book of tram pictures,” recalls Choi. But when he bumped into Ommer in Hong Kong (they had met in Thailand way back in 1987 when they were just 17-year-old boys) and found out that he is now a talented photographer (his pictures have appeared in Vogue, Time and the Globe), the cogs started turning. “I could realize my dream, as well as publish an actual book of photography for my old friend,” he says.

From five and a half thousand photographs, they arduously selected 500 images and bound them in book form. The pictures were all taken from February to October this year, and it became bit of an aesthetic ordeal at first. “You know, it was the financial crisis, and obviously, the trams had no ads on them, they were just all in their original green. Then the color started to come back,” Choi recollects with glee.