Finbarr Fallon, an architectural photographer, spent about four years documenting the vertical cemeteries on the space-squeezed island.
“I have always been intrigued by how city-specific cemetery design can be,” Fallon says via email. “While death is universal, its memorialization practices are not. I found it fascinating that extreme density and verticality continue to be a defining characteristic of Hong Kong’s dwellings for both the living and the dead.”
Hong Kong began suffering from land shortages in the late 1970s. Because of this, the government forbid the construction of new, permanent cemeteries in lieu of mass public burial sites. Amazingly, these cemeteries can reach heights up to 60 stories!
“The images juxtapose residences for two diametrically opposed groups—the high-rises for the living, and graves for the dead,” says Fallon of his photographs. While there is a conceptual tension between both environments, the geometric patterns that are reflected in both the skyscrapers’ gridded details and the cemetery’s uniform tombstones create a shared visual language.
Says Fallon: “In making this series I was interested in showing how death is a key force driving urban morphology: how memorializing people can mean they inadvertently live on to shape the landscape that the living continue to exist in, such that the dead might be said to wield more influence on the city morphology than they did when they were alive.”
Image Credit: Photo by Finbar Fallon