Farewell to Hong Kong
Photo editor Mikko Takkunen turns photographer for his book on Hong Kong, where he lived for five years. He grew to love it, and wanted to capture it in images before he left, he tells
Great love affairs don’t always start well, as was the case when Finnishborn photographer Mikko Takkunen landed for the first time in Hong Kong. ‘I got food poisoning and spent my first night sweating in bed,’ Mikko says. ‘I was disoriented from the 16-hour flight from New York. I couldn’t sleep. It was raining for the whole of the first month. I’d never been to Asia, and I thought I’d made the biggest mistake of my life.’
Mikko had flown to Hong Kong to start a job as a photo editor on the Asia desk of The New York Times, a demanding job covering more than 25 countries, including China and India. He found the city overwhelming. ‘I’d lived in London and New York, big cities, but Hong Kong’s on another level,’ he says.
‘It’s very dense, with skyscrapers, narrow streets, and people everywhere – you can’t escape it. The humidity’s insane. The city attacks your senses with the heat and the crowds.’ His stint in Hong Kong, from 2016 to 2021, also coincided with the violent pro-democracy protests of 2019-2020 and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Passion
But Mikko’s five years on the island reignited his passion for taking pictures. Originally trained as a photojournalist, he had hung up his cameras in 2012 when he started working as a photo editor in London.
‘I didn’t want to be seen to be playing for both teams, as a photographer and an editor, so for many years I didn’t take photos, apart from with my phone,’ he explains. ‘I sold my professional gear.’ As he writes in his new book, Hong Kong, he suddenly felt an ‘urgent need to pick up the camera myself, something I hadn’t done seriously in some time.’ In 2018, using a Fuji X100V that his wife bought him, he began taking photos again. ‘The urgency came from the fact we thought we had just a couple of months left in Hong Kong.
‘The New York Times wanted to transfer me to New York. Over the years, I’d learned to love Hong Kong. Both our daughters were born there and we have so many family memories there. I grew to love the density and having so many people around, those aspects
that had shocked me at first. Hong Kong island’s also very green – there’s a lot of jungle, hiking, beautiful beaches. We had so many friends from all over the world. When I realised we’d be leaving, I knew if I wanted to capture Hong Kong it would need to be done fast.’
Shooting Hong Kong
Mikko started taking photos on tram rides to and from work. As the pandemic took hold and office staff were told to work from home, he found he had time on his hands, often wandering the streets for hours in the mornings and at night. ‘It was a relief to go on the streets to take photos,’ he says.
The project saw him shift away from his roots in photojournalism. ‘Through my time in Hong Kong, I fell hard into mid-twentieth century New York street photography – people like Saul Leiter, Louis Faurer, Ernst Haas – not traditional photojournalism. Saul Leiter and Ernst Haas weren’t doing straightforward images – they often brought complexity to the image by using reflections, shooting through something, and finding unusual perspectives. I was also inspired by the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri’s book, Kodachrome, where he has almost surrealistic images.
‘I didn’t want to worry about whether I was directly documenting something. I wanted to make different images. I wanted to see differently and to challenge myself. Whatever captured my interests, I let myself take a photograph of it.’
The fact he was leaving Hong Kong suffused his photos with a sense of melancholy – he describes the book as his ‘farewell’. But there are other reasons for the sometimes downbeat, contemplative atmosphere. ‘With my work as a photo editor, I deal with images that are very much about something,’ he explains. ‘My own images are more expressionistic or impressionistic. But certain images hint at the changes that were happening.
‘The government really stopped the protests hard, especially with the National Security Law they brought in. That changed the city, and then the pandemic changed the city. Hong Kong had some of the strictest pandemic rules. There was a double whammy with the end of the protests and the stifling of freedom of expression, and then all the images taken during the pandemic time.
‘The pandemic is present in the images. There aren’t many images of people but the ones who are in the photos are wearing masks. The political change isn’t in the images, but there are thoughts and ideas I had in my mind.’
There’s an extra layer of sadness, too, with the book dedicated to Eska Takkunen. ‘My father died in the fall of 2016, just before I was going to head home from Hong Kong for the first time,’ Mikko says. ‘He was a taxi driver, which is why I’ve probably often found myself drawn to photographing taxis. There are several frames in the book showing or relating to taxis.’
The pandemic delayed the family’s move to New York, giving Mikko 18 months in the end to