People love taking photos of themselves, and they especially love taking photos of themselves on the Avenue of Stars. It's a long, seaside promenade in Hong Kong lined with statues and plaques honoring actors in the city’s movie industry. It's a tourist hotspot, and sightseers take full advantage of photo ops with stars from Bruce Lee to McDull the cartoon pig.
Artist Navin Kala and photographer Luisa Dörr noticed this popular pastime while they were in town last April and hatched a plan to take pictures of the picture-takers. They spent three weeks along the shoreline, avoiding weekends because of the overwhelming crowds. Armed with identical cameras and lenses, they would start at opposite end of the promenade and work toward the middle, documenting as many scenes as possible. “As soon as we spotted someone fun, or making weird poses, then we followed them from the distance, waiting for him or them to repeat the same pose,” says Dörr.
Dörr and Kala call the project The Self Promenade, and it's something of an anthropological study of contemporary culture. The series cheekily highlights the way smartphones often interrupt how people experience the world around them. The photos capture the various ways people contort themselves to get the "perfect" shot, often oblivious to how strange or silly they look. Many people go to great lengths to capture the ultimate Insta-moment, yet pay little attention to their surroundings.
“Two selfies at the Avenue of the Stars might seem a decent number of selfies for the souvenir and from there one can start enjoying the walk,” Dörr says. “And yet, people take them again and again, more and more selfies, as if it is the real and only way to relate to the external world.”
