Former Photojournalist and South Lantau Islander Anat Givon turns her lens on her backyard, with a few tweaks.
Elizabeth Kerr enjoys a private viewing at Pause Café
Photos by Beatrix Malan – www.atscollective.com
For someone who’s made a career out of capturing moments and creating images, photographer Anat Givon can really talk. She’s not aimless or selfaggrandising. She’s as inquisitive as she is informative. But over four hours she proves an effortless ability to bounce from the subject of cars being a pain the rear, frustrating PR agencies, restaurants lost to COVID, humidity in Bangkok versus Hong Kong, getting a lucky shot of a notorious murderer (Nancy Kissel), the Likud Party, the ethics of staging photos, and great places to shoot. She never repeats herself, and the amusing asides are myriad.
“When I first arrived here we used to go up on the roof on New Year’s Eve or CNY Eve to shoot the fireworks,” she begins, recalling taking pictures on the roof of the old – and once again – Regent Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui. Anat looks like an islander now, dressed for comfort, but the shock of silverwhite hair gives her a worldly, been-there-seen-that aspect. When she speaks it’s with a gentle, lilting Israeli accent.
“It was quite a scary thing, because there wasn’t any kind of barrier and you got up via a very rudimentary ladder. And you’re juggling all your equipment.” She shrugs. “It wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever done but it was certainly a challenge. Then they figured out it was dangerous and we weren’t allowed up there anymore. It was a great vantage point for photos.”
FRONTLINE PHOTOJOURNALISM
On a warm, breezy spring day, Anat sits on the patio at Pause Café in Mui Wo, where a series of her photos are currently on show. The Enchanted South Lantau Collection captures the hidden corners and most striking places of the island. After a career as a photojournalist with the Associated Press came to an end in 2005, Anat thought it was time to indulge her inner artist. She’d always had an interest in fine art, but didn’t think she had the talent for painting or drawing or sculpture. “The solution was the camera.”
Born in Haifa, Anat studied photography in Jerusalem before lucking into a job with AP in Tel Aviv in the late-1980s (“That’s such a party town”) – she went to a boyfriend’s job interview and impressed the bureau chief with her photography knowledge. The office needed someone to monitor and receive radio casts – the way photos were transmitted in the days before cloud servers – and develop, print and write captions in English.
That was the beginning of a career that saw her photographing two years of the First Intifada (“That was exciting,” she understates) and the invasion of Lebanon. Those were her years of jumping roofs, dodging Israeli police, hiding the fact she herself was Israeli in Palestinian districts, and waiting for mines to be cleared off roads into Lebanon. “When you’re young you do all kinds of stupid things, not thinking. Driving around the West Bank at night, alone, was not a good idea,” she says. In a competitive industry with three large agencies always looking for above the fold images, capturing a naked girl running from napalm or a starving child being watched by a vulture is lightning in a bottle, and in truth Anat wasn’t actively aiming for a legacy shot.
“I was more terrified of my photo editor in London sometimes,” she says with a laugh. “I was just happy to have a job. It wasn’t something I set out to do, even when I was studying photography. My teachers were focused on studio photography and they kind of looked down on press photography, except for one instructor who told us about documentary photography.”
Among some of her great shots are of Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar and of the handover when she was posted here in 1997. Her work can be seen online at Business Insider, Al Jazeera and CNN’s 25th anniversary of the handover photo essay. Now Anat runs her own digital arts company (www.anatgivon.com), under which she produced the Lantau series and accepts other commissions.
ENHANCEMENT AND CREATIVE CHOICE
Unlike some arrivals to Hong Kong, Anat was not at all surprised by the city’s natural beauty having spent years combing it for her AP work. “I once spent weeks looking for a crocodile in Yuen Long,” she tosses out. She also lived in Sai Kung for a decade before a stint in the city, and the last four years in South Lantau. The move was partly due to her husband’s new job in airport security and because they both enjoyed the village vibe. “We looked at flats in Discovery Bay when my husband took his job; it wasn’t really for us. But South Lantau is fantastic.”
Aside from the obvious burnout stemming from so much time in conflict zones, what made Anat pivot to a kind of photography so far removed from what she knew? She admits journalism was intensely satisfying, especially when the stars aligned for the perfect shot, but she started to feel the artistic itch again, which is impossible with photojournalism. There are, rightly so, rules to obey. But the two forms aren’t entirely disconnected from each other.
“Photojournalism and artistic photography are both about composition and the placement of things within that frame. Photojournalism is a bit more complicated because you have to explain what’s happening at an event at a given time. But if you’re a good photojournalist, you imbue that with an aesthetic.” She points to titans like Steve McCurry (Afghan Girl) or war photographer James Nachtwey as some of the best at marrying news and art, as well as personal favourites like American street photographer Joel Meyerowitz (The North Wall) and William Egglestone’s southern US landscapes. So in 2005, Anat did some digital coursework in London that opened up a new creative avenue, one that didn’t require people in photos – a staple in photojournalism. “I could never put buffaloes in a tree.”
Anat is, of course, referring to Buffaloes, Bird, Yogis & Dog, one of the photos on display at Pause; a vaguely surreal Lantau snapshot in bold colour. “We want to think that images come straight out of the camera, but no. No. You need to work on them. There is a second stage, even back when there were negatives,” Anat stresses. “There is enhancement and creative choice.”
HOMAGE TO THE ISLAND
From surrealist photographic collages to more naturalistic photos of Lantau villages and seascapes, The Enchanted South Lantau Collection is a true homage to the island, capturing both its quirkiness and beauty.
Anat points out that Hong Kong photography almost always focuses on the city’s urban identity, and indeed many of her commissions are heavily geometric, manipulating light and lines to look straight out of a Jean-Luc Godard film. But the saturated landscapes, textured monochromes and graphically enhanced architectures of Soko Islands (“I actually see this outside my window. Though I did get help from a 600mm lens”) and Man Receives a Letter, among others, are a way to pay tribute to another, greener side of Hong Kong, from another point of view.
“I walk a lot, I see the villages, and it’s just so beautiful. I usually have some kind of camera with me, and because I’m here more now I find the local, grassroots life so interesting and full of character. There’s all kinds of curious stuff here, and I want to capture it.”
Back in Lantau after an extended visit to the UK and Israel, Anat is armed with some new themes and ideas to start working on. She’ll keep taking commissions too. “I like the idea of working on someone else’s brief because they often put something in your mind that wasn’t there before,” she finishes. “It’s like an irritating grain of sand that ends up as a pearl.”