Photo editor Mikko Takkunen turns photographer for his book on Hong Kong, where he lived for five years. He grew to love it, and wanted to capture it in images before he left, he tells Graeme Green
Great love affairs don’t always start well, as was the case when Finnishborn photographer Mikko Takkunen landed for the first time in Hong Kong. ‘I got food poisoning and spent my first night sweating in bed,’ Mikko says. ‘I was disoriented from the 16-hour flight from New York. I couldn’t sleep. It was raining for the whole of the first month. I’d never been to Asia, and I thought I’d made the biggest mistake of my life.’
Mikko had flown to Hong Kong to start a job as a photo editor on the Asia desk of The New York Times, a demanding job covering more than 25 countries, including China and India. He found the city overwhelming. ‘I’d lived in London and New York, big cities, but Hong Kong’s on another level,’ he says.
‘It’s very dense, with skyscrapers, narrow streets, and people everywhere – you can’t escape it. The humidity’s insane. The city attacks your senses with the heat and the crowds.’ His stint in Hong Kong, from 2016 to 2021, also coincided with the violent pro-democracy protests of 2019-2020 and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Passion But Mikko’s five years on the island reignited his passion for taking pictures. Originally trained as a photojournalist, he had hung up his cameras in 2012 when he started working as a photo editor in London.
‘I didn’t want to be seen to be playing for both teams, as a photographer and an editor, so for many years I didn’t take photos, apart from with my phone,’ he explains. ‘I sold my professional gear.’ As he writes in his new book, Hong Kong, he suddenly felt an ‘urgent need to pick up the camera myself, something I hadn’t done seriously in some time.’ In 2018, using a Fuji X100V that his wife bought him, he began taking photos again. ‘The urgency came from the fact we thought we had just a couple of months left in Hong Kong.
‘The New York Times wanted to transfer me to New York. Over the years, I’d learned to love Hong Kong. Both our daughters were born there and we have so many family memories there. I grew to love the density and having so many people around, those aspects that had shocked me at first. Hong Kong island’s also very green – there’s a lot of jungle, hiking, beautiful beaches. We had so many friends from all over the world. When I realised we’d be leaving, I knew if I wanted to capture Hon
