Hin Chua's Magnetic North

It’s been a summer of incredible busy-ness so far. Even though I’m still not making as many photographs as I’d like, every spare moment seems to be fully allocated. I can’t remember spending any weekend over the last two months actually in London, I’ve either been travelling, shooting or having adventures with various groups of friends. 

Here’s something that happened in, whoa, February: Adam Chidell dropped me an email, asking to profile me as part of the journalism degree he was doing. I could hardly resist, being never one to refrain from shooting my mouth off and generally embarrassing myself. Adam did a great job, especially with the opening sentence (damn that big mouth again), hopefully I helped him get a decent grade!

Profile of Hin Chua, by Adam Chidell 

Sex or photography: which would you sooner give up? It’s a hypothetical dilemma, but one that gives Hin Chua pause for thought. His answer is full of sub-clauses, but ultimately it seems he’d rather hang on to the camera. He explains: “After a week without taking photos, I’m like a caged animal beating myself up.”

Hin’s quiet voice, trendy glasses and spacious Shoreditch flat make the image incongruous. But this cool exterior belies an all-consuming passion that even extends to choosing photographers as friends, “So that even if it’s a social engagement, technically speaking it’s still photography.”

The obsession began in 2005, shortly after he moved to London from his hometown of Perth in Australia. The migration was an attempt to shake things up: “If I’d stayed there, within two years I’d have had a house and car and been looking forward to middle age.” But the move came at the cost of a long-term relationship with a girlfriend. “She was to follow me and ultimately she never did. I was left heartbroken.”

Taking photos became a form of therapy, an excuse to get out into the world. Early forays involved entire days spent wandering London’s streets, burning through rolls of film. It’s an approach Hin now dismisses as haphazard and futile.

His latest series of work, After the Fall, is much more methodical. The project documents the “ongoing environmental struggle” at the periphery of urban areas and has taken him to 40 cities across 15 countries. Potential locations are carefully scouted well in advance using Google’s satellite maps. Once he’s arrived, he often walks10 to 20 miles in search of suitable material.

The industrial hinterland around London has provided consistently rich pickings. Over the past two years Hin has travelled both banks of the Thames, from Greenwich to the North Sea, carrying little more than his medium format camera and spare film. When the places he wanted to photograph became too remote to warrant train stations, he bought a fold-up bicycle. But photography is not an extension of love for nature: “I have always hated the outdoors. I’m short-sighted, I have flat feet that hurt very easily, I’ve never camped or fished or hiked.”

Given this, his work ethic seems astonishing – doubly so when I find out he has a full- time career making mobile banking software. But this setup works well – weekdays are for making software, while weekends and holidays are for photography. On a trip to Japan at Christmas, he had a rare few days of holiday without photography. The experience seems to have been mildly traumatising. “When you’re on holiday, where’s the hope?” he asks, adding sarcastically: “Gosh – can’t wait for tomorrow’s breakfast and museum!”

Is he ever tempted to pack in the day job and focus on his art full-time? A roundabout analogy to Cortez’s decision to burn his boats ends with a simpler reason for keeping the job: “I’m not bloody waiting tables when I don’t have to!”

Besides, these two parts of his life are not mutually exclusive. Between 2005 and 2007 – during the boom that preceded the financial crisis – he worked in an investment bank and started taking photographs around the office: “I was pretty much the weird guy who would always bring his camera in”. The project – They called me a corporate whore – documents the daily tragicomedy playing out in the City.

But an air of ambivalence hangs over everything he did before After the Fall. “A lot of my past work was the photographic equivalent of sleeping around, of trying out different things. Those projects helped educate me, but I could never go back and do any of those any more.” The future lies with this new project and it’s successor – although it’s not yet clear what that will be.

Hin has a vast collection of photography books, and we end our chat looking at some beautiful editions by astonishingly accomplished photographers. Hin wants to join their ranks: “The aim for me has always been a book. A book’s the best there is.” He picks out Joel Sternfeld’s masterful American Prospects and tenderly, almost reverently turns the pages with two hands, commenting on his favourite shots. It will surprise me if, one day soon, people are not doing the same thing with an edition of After the Fall.