Nicknamed the Monster Building, the residential complex in Hong Kong’s Quarry Bay is actually made up of five imposing tower blocks. In 2018, Canadian photographer Scott A Woodward had set up camp in the shadow of one, the Yick Cheong building, to shoot an ad campaign for Foot Locker. “It’s a heavy, teeming, living organism; a crazy cacophony of life and colour,” he says. “There are 10,000 people living there, and people travel from all over to see it.”
The team was large and busy, vying for space in the courtyard with tourists and Instagrammers drawn to the building after it featured in the films Transformers: Age of Extinction and Ghost in the Shell. When a break was called on set, Woodward wandered away from the crowd to take a breather.
“I walked into this nextdoor courtyard and it was completely empty, aside from four women playing cards. They never even looked up or acknowledged me. I didn’t bother them, I just took this candid shot and left them in peace. I like to try to find the moment between the moment – little slices of connection, of humanity.”
Woodward believes that using his phone allowed the photograph to happen. “If I’d pulled out my big camera and lights, they might have become self-conscious, they might have waved me away.”
He also credits phone photography with helping him develop his skills as a professional. “Over the last decade, I must have taken hundreds of thousands of additional photos when I didn’t have my camera. All of that extra opportunity, those extra moments? That has to have made me a better photographer.”
