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Yau Leung was the Chinese Cartier-Bresson. Why isn't he better known?

Cheongsams (1961)

The pictures featured here are by a photographer called Yau Leung 邱良 (1941-1997). He’s one of Hong Kong’s most significant and accomplished documentary photographers, but scandalously little-known outside the city. Can we put that right?

His work documents a changing Hong Kong, spanning the colonial days of the 60s to post-handover 90s. The best known of his photographs is the one of the two ladies in cheongsam seen from the back. It's an image that distills the essence of change: a time when people still considered traditional Chinese garb as their daily wardrobe – but in a quickly westernising city. What most people don’t know is that the rest of the photographer’s portfolio is every bit as glorious as this picture.

Yau Leung started his professional life on film sets, working at the famous Shaw Brothers Studio. In parallel, he documented street scenes and daily lives of the people in Hong Kong. This personal project reveals the real Yau Leung: it's an astonishing archive.

These images remind me of the great master of photojouralism, Henri Cartier-Bresson: strong and challenging compositions, a balanced spectrum of light and dark, technical mastery of selective focus. Above all, like those of Cartier-Bresson, his subjects are infused with humanity – telling a story, eliciting a smile or a question.

Where is that girl going in the half-sized moped? Why are the little boys being told off by the little girl? Yau Leung chased what Cartier-Bresson called "The Decisive Moment", capturing a scene at the crucial split-second.

Yau Leung’s career was tragically cut short by a freak accident at the age of 56: he fell while changing a lightbulb in his studio. What he left behind is a treasure trove of a gentle era, one that my parents knew – the calm before the storm of aggressive consumerism.

A selection of Yau Leung's work can be seen at Picture This.

This article is from my blog on the Daily Telegraph Originally published on 1 Jan 2014