There are three distinctive features in the February edition of DOUBLE DOUBLE: drawings, photographs and cameras.

It opens with a project by Canadian artist Bill Burns - a cross-media work titled The Salt, the Oil the Milk. This project is about trade, animals, advanced industrialism, and exchanges; things that change hands, from small, minuscule dealings to large international transactions. An on-going and developing work incorporating performance, drawings and sculptures, it has been shown in cities in Europe, Argentina, New York, Toronto and Vancouver.

Echoing Bill Burns’ drawings is Tomio Nitto’s suite of camera drawings. The illustrator once said that he could sketch faster than a camera. But soon after he started the drawing project he retracted his words. He found that the camera was not just a square box and a lens; each connection switch, each dial and button had incredible details. He later commented, “The camera has a beauty, and in my simple drawings, I make beauty too.” At length, beauty exists in all things - including man-made.

Lee Ka-sing responded to Tomio’s camera drawings by photographing four of his cameras. As he was writing about his cameras, a lot of past stories scurried back across his mind. Good old time it was. We bring back some of those moments in the middle section of this book, showing a collection of photographs of Hong Kong in the second half of the twentieth century, all of which taken by three veteran photographers: Mak Fung, Ngan Chun-tung and Yau Leung. Photographs and cameras, they complement each other.