Mr. Chu

Around a year ago pH and I encountered Mr. Chu. Mr. Chu seemed to be present, albeit in dif­ferent personas, in six pho­to­graphs I had taken around that time: he was an Everyman, one single meta-​man who rep­res­ented many others. The idea was to present his story in Acts and Scenes, the first set of images the six scenes of the first act. The plan then was for more to follow, and more may yet follow; but for now Mr. Chu inhabits a place, a floating world, that is cur­rently off limits. This post is a memorial to Chu, wherever he may be. The captions below each pho­to­graph were created during the Gtalk chat that led to the creation of the set itself.

A photograph by Gareth Jelley.

Scene One — “ONE, two, three, four, Mr. Chu thought as he walked the alley to the Bureau…”

A photograph by Gareth Jelley.

Scene Two — “The head­lights silently approached and Mr. Chu wondered, for a moment, if they were coming for him…”

A photograph by Gareth Jelley.

Scene Three — “As usual, on these nightly trips to his fate, Mr. Chu felt deeply the pain of the infinite commute towards darkness.”

A photograph by Gareth Jelley.

Scene Four — “Mr. Chu had powers, he realised; it was just a matter of deciding how to use them.”

A photograph by Gareth Jelley.

Scene Five — “He stood in the station as he always stood, Mr. Chu to himself, Mr. Chu to the rest of the world.”

A photograph by Gareth Jelley.

Scene Six — “Later in life, Mr. Chu would look back on his failures and try to find out where he had wrong, how he had become the pianist who always hit the wrong keys.”