Kwok Tan, Borrowed Time (DOCO 2021)

You’ve finished school. Now get a job, pay off your study loans. Build a career, build your life, your aspirations. Get a better job. Buy a car, buy a home, get a mortgage. Start a family. Pay for the day care, pay the school fees. Pay for your own further education. You need to get that promotion, to stay relevant at work. Hold on to that job, that regular wage. You have bills to pay, credit card debt, a mortgage to manage. The daily grind is almost a blur in our waking moments. Like a surreal dream where we seem to be living on borrowed time. This series is part of an ongoing street photography project, Bright Lights Dark City, that is informed by my previous career in financial services. I had just returned to Australia after a decade working overseas. To reconnect with Sydney where I had studied and started my career, I started photographing the streets of the city. I found I was drawn to document the daily lives of city workers, in the process making sense of my own career and life choices.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.