The Western District Public Cargo Working Area, a marine dock in Hong Kong’s Kennedy Town, has for several years been better known as Instagram Pier. Every day, tourists and locals gather on the dock to take selfies and staged portraits, or to watch the sun go down over the city.
The photographer Pierfrancesco Celada discovered the pier by chance. His wife was expecting their first child and he needed somewhere to walk and take pictures that was not too far from their house, in case she went into labour. In those last weeks of her pregnancy, his short trips to the pier became a daily routine: photographing the ever-changing cast of Instagrammers and bridal couples who used the dock as their backdrop. This picture, of other people taking pictures on a pile of bamboo scaffolding poles, is typical of those collected in his book, Instagrampier. The photographs are all about repetition, of people adopting the same poses as those who preceded them the day before – and believing that this is their singular moment. Celada came to see the pier as a place of communal transformation “between our real selves and the way we wish our lives were perceived”.
The pier is still a working dock, but used less frequently than in the past, because it cannot accommodate larger modern cargo ships. Its towers of primary-coloured oil drums, ziggurats of wooden pallets and graffiti-covered shipping containers have instead been repurposed as props on thousands of social media pages. A quick search suggests that no Hong Kong romance is complete if a couple have not scaled a loading bay or clambered on to security barriers to embrace. Celada’s interest in the site has also taken a postmodern twist – he recently began curating the Instagram Pier’s own Instagram account.
Instagrampier by Pierfrancesco Celada is available at pierfrancescocelada.com, £30
