Features September 2020∣Youth Hong Kong
Through new lenses by Matthew Ngai I peered through the viewfinder with one eye. Suddenly, there was a little boy standing barefoot on a rock, leaning forward on the edge of a wet mill. A worker raked through the fermenting coffee cherries in the background on the right. I adjusted and readjusted the focus of my lenses, searching for the perfect framing and depth of field. Then, the boy’s father stepped into the frame on the left, towering above him on the stone ledge. The little boy glanced up. Snap!
It was the summer of 2019 in Papua New Guinea. I was volunteering at Bolaven Farms, a social enterprise that aims to improve the livelihoods of smallholding coffee farmers through better production methods. Not long before, I had been a lazy, unmotivated teenager. Every day, I would wake up late having snoozed my alarm four times, rush to school without eating breakfast or even brushing my teeth, sleep through most if not all of my classes, and, after school, sit on the couch all day playing FIFA on my PlayStation. One thing I had always been a little bit passionate about, though, was photography. Ever since my dad handed me his camera when I was nine, I had been the family paparazzo, constantly taking shots of my family, but it wasn’t until this trip that I truly understood the power of photography. To the naked eye, that little boy was just another impoverished child living in an underdeveloped country. As I zoomed in with my camera and observed his every move, I started to understand his story. How his bare feet were swollen red from stepping through the waterlogged floors of the mill. How a layer of crusted mud coated his dark skin. How at the same age, I had been given a digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera on a family vacation while that little boy spent his days among labouring men and whirring machinery. But I 44
