If you’ve seen Wong Kar-Wai’s great Chungking Express or have even stayed in one of the hundreds of hostels in Chungking Mansions, you’ll have an idea what living in Hong Kong is like for some of its most disenfranchised population. The rush and aesthetic grit of movies and gap-year tourism—of “roughing it”—obscures the harsh realities of urban life here. Space is tight, with entire families cramped in oppressively narrow rooms filled to the brim with the very necessary material goods of existence. Nowhere are these conditions more obscene than in the so-called “cubicle apartments”—40 square-foot living spaces that result from the near-infinite subdividing of floor space—that house over 100,000 people in the city, according to the Society for Community Organization (SOCO), a Chinese human rights group.

SOCO has commissioned a photo series to make public the atrocious living spaces that so many people have to endure. Click through to see more.

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Nave, Sainte-Chappelle, Paris, France, 2006. Photo (c) David Stephenson.

Judging by his website, photographer David Stephenson is interested in two subjects: contemporary cities, and the historical evidence of human ingenuity.

The American artist’s portfolio is awash in glowing mega-blocks and wide-angle cityscapes presented alongside Vaults, a technically dazzling collection of pre-Modern religious architecture. Vaults looks at the ceilings of cathedrals all over Europe, shot directly from below to “flatten” the depth of the spaces. Together with Light Cities, the work offers an interesting definition of the sublime. Stephenson, in his own words, says he’s drawn to “what is both good and bad in our industrialized culture: an extraordinary example of a monumental technological sublime, where awe, beauty, and human aspiration are tinged with the horror of potential environmental catastrophe, our engine of modernity seemingly running on empty.”

Both of Stephenson’s subjects — the complexities of the Megacity and the virtuosic efforts of medieval master builders — depict the same human impulse. To my eyes, they also share a similar visual taxonomy; a pattern language that, oddly enough, is common between the sexpartite rib vaults of a 14^th century cathedral and fractal urban clustering of Tokyo seen from above.

Images from Vaults (and a companion series, Domes) appeared in two Princeton Architectural Press publications in 2005 and 2009. More of his images are here.

Choir, King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, England, 2006. Photo (c) David Stephenson.

Choir, Gloucester Cathedral, Gloucester, England, 2006. Photo (c) David Stephenson.

Photo (c) David Stephenson.

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