Rapt

A pretty heavy crop today but thankfully it was a bright(ish) day, so there isn't much noise in the photo. Still, I should probably train myself to rely less on cropping!

I went out intending to shoot a street portrait but couldn't muster up the courage to ask anyone! However there were so many of these men around listening to their radios and staring at their papers that I couldn't resist taking a photo. Several times I tried to catch their eyes but they were too enraptured to notice! Hence this shot.

What were these men so focussed on? The races, of course. Betting on horse races is the only legal form of gambling in Hong Kong, and there are races every Wednesday and Saturday. On these days, you cannot escape the sight of men — rarely women — holding specialist racing journals on the trains, in restaurants, everywhere. This amusing passage from Jan Morris's excellent Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire suggests just how rapt punters can be:

'… the races grip the Hong Kong masses as nothing else: when in 1986, 300 detectives in forty squads simultaneously cracked down on drug-traffickers and loan-sharks all over the territory, they chose that moment of universal distraction, the start of the three o'clock race at Happy Valley.'

60/365