Images discussed:
Kowloon City Cross Section, This is Colossal scan, 4500×1636
Kowloon City Cross Section, Kowloon Large Illustrated (1997), Amazon book scan, 2560×956
Composite Kowloon City Cross Section, 3166×925
Kowloon City Cross Section, deconcrete.org scan, 4716×1754
I first saw an image of the cross section of Kowloon Walled City in 2014. It is a wonderful illustration of the infamously dense city within a city that once existed in Hong Kong. The attention to detail is extraordinary, with a dozen birds, hundreds of glowing orange human silhouettes, and the outlines of thousands of household objects filling up the canvas. Each room is unique, every shape is different from the others of its type. The messes of television antennae on the roofs initially appear to be trees, while the plants inside apartments are colored solid green, setting them apart from the other hollow, unfilled objects surrounding them.
The busy city shines in its full 4500×1636 resolution. Every silhouette tells a story. As waking arms stretch over a bottom bunk bed, someone else falls asleep outside on the roof. Behind a wall on which a man carrying a large bag leans, a pair of people sit facing each other across a folding table and a small child climbs up on a counter. It’s not clear whether the man with the bag is aware of the people on the other side or if they are strangers to him.
Something else about the image stands out: it was a sloppy scan, of shoddy and inconsistent quality. There are obvious vertical division lines showing where the separate scans overlapped (not unlike the idea of “seams” in some digital images, which I wrote a bit about earlier this week), and varying color profiles and levels. The bottoms of the page numbers and some text are cut off on the edges, and entire vertical slices of buildings gradually slide into the dividing gutter on the left side of the image.
I am pretty sure that the scan which experienced a mini-revival on the internet a few years ago was from a This Is Colossal article, published November 4, 2014, which featured the illustration and the book it originally appeared in. The book’s title is in Japanese, but is translated on Amazon as Kowloon Large Illustrated (1997).