This is a short auto-ethnographic exploration into how the aesthetics of live music film photography relate to memory in the Hong Kong indie music scene. Through exploring my engagement with film photography, I suggest that loss of fidelity is important to memory for those in the spaces I describe here. I would use the Chinese expression 失真 (sut tzun) to describe this relationship: quite literally meaning “loss of realism.” In practical use, the term usually means “the distortion of an image or sound.” Memory itself is not something that is “high-fidelity,” retaining an image’s photoreal quality like photos or videos do. Rather, my memories are distorted by my own subjectivity, shaped by the selective focus of my vision and hearing in the moment, my movements in and through the crowd, the emotions I feel in response to the music, the collectivity of the affair. This exploration includes a series of film photographs taken during my own ethnographic fieldwork that demonstrate how distortions in film photography relate to memory in the scene.

Photo 1. Guitarist playing at an indie gig, film speeds necessitated the use of a slow shutter speed resulting in a lot of motion blur. Photo supplied by author.

To me, not only are film photos less sharp than digital ones due to the limitations of film (especially the low ISO speeds leading to more motion blur—see Photo 1), but the grainy texture of film—exacerbated by the lack of film supply in recent years causing many to use expired film—gives me as a viewer room to embed affective memories of the event onto the photo. This allows more space for me to affectively reimagine what I felt during the gig than a high-fidelity digital photo might offer. A digital photo of a musician backlit by a stage light may achieve clarity of both the harsh light and the musician’s face, thus informing the viewer of the performer’s expression. When shooting film, however, I would choose to have the performer’s face underexposed to achieve a faster shutter speed to eliminate motion blur (Photo 2). In this example, when I later revisit the photo as a viewer, I will have to revert back to my memory of the event to imagine what the performer’s facial expression was, and how the elements in the rest of the image interact with his expression. This interaction between the photo and my memory of the event forms an almost living image, imbued with affective memories of the moment—how I felt, how the music felt, what I perceived the musician to be feeling or thinking at the time, the significance of that very moment and my role as an ethnographer in that time and space.

Photo 2. Guitarist playing at an indie gig, the bright stage light forced me to choose a faster shutter speed to avoid overexposure, resulting in the guitarist’s facial expression and other details to be underexposed. Photo supplied by author.

The Hong Kong indie scene is a precarious community of musicians dedicated to DIY forms of cultural production, demarcated against the mainstream music sphere largely dominated by Cantopop. The indie scene is thus made up of musicians playing a wide range of genres of music catering to a vastly smaller audience than the mainstream. The indie scene was also labeled as an “alternative,” “underground,” or “band” scene, directly referencing the tendencies of musicians in the scene to perform as bands in contrast to individual singers as the star in Cantopop, and playing music that was stylistically different to the pop ballads that dominate the mainstream music landscape. After three years of fieldwork in the Hong Kong indie music scene between 2020 and 2023, I feel that the aesthetic of film photography also lends itself to a feeling of impermanence and pastness. As cliche as it may be, almost 50 years after Richard Hughes’s (1976) statement that Hong Kong is a “borrowed place living on borrowed time” still resonates as the dominant feeling that I get when shooting gigs; I’m recording something that, even in the moment, has already passed into memory. Gigs in the indie scene are especially ephemeral in Hong Kong compared to the mainstream Cantopop music sphere. Cantopop concerts often span multiple evenings of more or less the same show and are captured by cameras from many angles that are eventually produced into a DVD for sale a few months after the concert, a commodity that is still popular in the music industry in Hong Kong for audiences to buy as souvenirs. These performance films are then used for online and offline advertising for the artist, made into music videos or simply uploaded to YouTube and other music streaming services for further consumption by fans. Audience members at concerts frequently use their mobile phones to record videos of the concert, forming a sea of mobile phone screens (電話海 deen wah hoi) in the crowd, a common complaint of some Cantopop fans. In contrast, indie gigs are mostly one-time occurrences where a gig with the same lineup in the same venue only happens once. Recordings and videos of these gigs are also hard to find, as I will explain in the following.

In contrast, indie venues operate precariously in legal gray areas in Hong Kong by operating out of factory building units. This violates antiquated industrial building codes. Live venues have been shut down in the past for violating these codes and, when combined with the high price of rent, it is hard to tell when a venue may close, increasing the feeling of ephemerality during each gig. This feeling is also made stronger by the scene’s ethos of “being in the moment,” encouraging audiences to enjoy the gig with their senses rather than recording the event on their phones or cameras (Photo 3).

Photo 3. Band member interacting with crouching audience at a gig, preparing them to jump up when the chorus hit. Note that there are no phones to be seen. Photo supplied by author.

Indie artists and bands in Hong Kong also tend to not last that long, and the high cost of living and long working hours mean that time available for musicians to work on music is limited. Groups frequently disband without releasing albums or even EPs because of members’ limited time to work on music, or due to members leaving Hong Kong as part of the latest emigration wave of residents fleeing the hostile and worsening political climate. Any gig could be a band’s last gig, and audiences are aware of this. The grainy and lo-fidelity film aesthetic associated with an outmoded technology firmly colors my memory of a gig with a tinge of pastness, an acknowledgement that I only experienced this gig once and can not relive it again through any method of recording—that “you had to be there.”

Photo 4. Singer lying on the stage at an indie gig. Photo supplied by author.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, this ephemerality was even more pronounced. Strict social distancing laws increased the chances of a police raid that would ensure that the venue would never operate again. As a way to mitigate risk, audiences were told not to post gig photos online, further limiting any record of these gigs to photos taken by “official” organizer-appointed photographers like myself. Another measure was to limit the number of gigs, making them rare occurrences especially early on in the pandemic. This only seemed to increase the determination of attendees to get the most out of gigs by participating fully—not knowing when the next gig may be—by joining mosh pits or head banging to the music, something that is very rare in the mainstream. The scarcity of gigs in this respect mirrors the scarcity of film to me. Knowing the fragility of venues and bands, the frame counter on my camera is almost a metaphor of the passing of time in a calendar: every click of the shutter counts down to the end of the roll, every time I leave a venue is another tick in the countdown to a venue or band’s final gig, whenever that may be. Each photo burned into film is another reminder to myself that any band or venue’s days are numbered.

Photo 5. An audience member emotionally responding to a song at a gig during the pandemic. Photo supplied by author.

Photo 6. Audiences and videographers at the final gig held at Hong Kong livehouse TTN, which was held during the beginning of the pandemic and shortly after the 2019 protests. Photo supplied by author.

Finally, in my eyes the flaws of film photography enhances its ability to elicit emotion, analogous to the way indie musicians approach perfectionism in their music. Compared to mainstream Cantopop music, indie music in Hong Kong is much more gritty, less polished and refined, some perhaps containing “flaws” that would not be allowed to go to the final master of a Cantopop DVD. Notes played slightly off time and melodies sung a bit out of tune highlight the human behind the music, the closeness that I as a listener can feel to the performer. To see their flaws is to see and feel their humanness. The grainy and blurry photo of someone stage diving conveys the humanity of the affair; the motion, the excitement when I am caught off guard behind the camera to capture the moment (Photo 7). To me, what film sees is closer to what I as an audience member see: fleeting moments of exhilaration, monochrome memories colored with nostalgia and longing, the feeling that I was glad to be there for these once in a lifetime experiences yet melancholic that these experiences are rarer than I would like. The future of the scene, and of Hong Kong at large, is unclear; but film photography allows me to remember these events in my own subjective way, the emotions I felt during gigs are engraved into the negatives in my drawer and others may be able to relive their feelings of the evening through these photos.

Photo 7. Singer falling backwards after being dragged off stage by audience members trying to grab the microphone. Photo supplied by author.

Hughes, Richard. 1976. Borrowed Place, Borrowed Time: Hong Kong and Its Many Faces. 2nd rev. ed. London: Deutsch.