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Ben Hoh

@pedestrian.ben

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Mostly on foot. Grappling with everyday networks of spaces, places, people and things, and sometimes taking photos of them. Designing at Studio Thing.

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Release the Bats is about lifting the burden of always having to explain oneself to a racist society. Rather than plead that “I’m really quite nice if you get to know me,” I’m taking inspiration from one of popular culture’s best known avenging masked heroes: Batman. Unlike more affable superheroes, Batman explicitly uses his iconography to strike fear in his enemies, and in some incarnations to even grapple with his own fear of bats.

Can Asian Australians perversely appropriate the racist associations that attempt to taint us, and reanimate them for our own ends? In response to racist taunts that Chinese Australians should “go eat a bat”, the bat (through Batman) becomes an powerful symbol of avenging justice. When superimposed with 19th Century zoologist (and scientific racist) Ernst Haeckel’s illustrations of bats, with their flat faces and squinting eyes, I’m exploring and rerouting the paranoid chain of symbols that can cluster around the cross-species spillover of coronavirus from bat to human in China, making it resonate with the spillover of historically unwelcome Asian immigration into the West.

When given a deliberately Chinese framing, through re-colourisation and juxtaposition with the Chinese characters for “vampire” (jiang shi – 殭屍), Haeckel’s bat images begin to resonate with both the iconography of traditional Chinese shíshī (石獅) lions, and also begin to resemble Eiko Ishioka’s Oscar-winning suit of armour for Bram Stoker’s Dracula(1992), which contributed to the nobility of Dracula as a tragic anti-hero. Thus, in the midst of troubling stereotypes, we find dignity. by @pedestrian.ben

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6 years ago

Mirror. #streetphotography #ttartisan56mmf18 #peopleonstreets by @pedestrian.ben

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a year ago

Can you spare some letterforms?

Incidentally, I took this photo from outside the office of an infamous Australian neo-Nazi. Was sorely tempted to smash his windows in with a brick — this is an appropriate way to deal with literal fascism, so don’t bait me with rhetoric about civil debate — but he’d already pre-empted this with plenty of bars.

But how do we deal with *enablers* of fascism, rather than the open Holocaust deniers or unashamed admirers of Hitler? What do we do about the cowardly “it’s very complicated” hand-wringing allows the most grotesque flourishing of fascist, exterminationist practices in places that ghoulishly purport to be their opposite? What kind of decay allows this to happen?

When I take photos of different (and often bleak) pieces of our urban landscape, it’s often with great love and enthusiasm, even if it hurts. I think I do it in a weirdly matter-of-fact, almost naive way. But sometimes I feel like these pieces of our lifeworld that I’m trying to navigate with my camera are actually telling me that our world is irreparably broken.

#streetphotography #urbanlandscape #documentingspace #everydaylife #signage #decay #ruins #fascism #genocide #palestine #Israel #despair #contemporarylife by @pedestrian.ben

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a year ago

New light. #everydaylife #mundane #iphone17pro by @pedestrian.ben

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A sneak peek at some details from Jagged Eye, my first photo zine. As you can see, I’m chasing the worst possible image quality: it’s mostly low-resolution 1-bit dithered stuff, with a few adventurous 3-bit photos thrown in to uh, spice things up. I’ll be at #parramattazinefair at @aceparramatta on 26 September, showcasing this and other low quality meditations on everyday life, mundanity, entropy and all that good stuff. #streetphotography #documentingspace #everydaylife #mundane by @pedestrian.ben

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a month ago

Hidden hump. #streetphotography #documentingspace #everydaylife #mundane #signage #dslr #nikon #nikondf #nikkor50mmf18AFD by @pedestrian.ben

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2 months ago

Step up. #transitphotography #publictransport #trainstation #documentingspace #everydaylife #mundane #dslr #nikon #nikondf #nikkor50mmf18AFD by @pedestrian.ben

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2 months ago

Electric white chocolate. #streetphotography #documentingspace #everydaylife #mundane #peopleonstreets #dslr #nikon #nikondf #nikkor50mmf18AFD by @pedestrian.ben

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2 months ago

Void. #streetphotography #documentingspace #everydaylife #mundane #nikon #nikonzf #ttartisan40mmf2 by @pedestrian.ben

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2 months ago

DEVILS FIP. #streetphotography #documentingspace #everydaylife #mundane #signage #typography #nikon #nikonzf #ttartisan40mmf2 by @pedestrian.ben

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2 months ago

Freezer. #everydaylife #mundane #iphone17pro by @pedestrian.ben

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2 months ago

Resistors. #streetphotography #documentingspace #everydaylife #mundane #infrastructure #dslr #nikon #nikondf #nikkor50mmf18AFD by @pedestrian.ben

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