David Niu, street photographer: Heart of the Nation
David Niu emigrated from Shanghai in 2007, and says he still struggles with the language barrier in Australia. But his street photography of his adopted city speaks volumes.
David Niu was 40 when he emigrated from Shanghai with his wife and two young daughters. He spoke very little English at the time, and 17 years on he says he still struggles with the language: “I feel like an outsider, sometimes.” But he’s a man of intense curiosity, full of wonder about his adopted city of Melbourne. And since discovering street photography he has found a way to transcend words in his interactions with the world. There’s a sort of visual language – quirky, observant, warm-hearted – that we can all understand in these images, don’t you think?
Niu works from home in Maribyrnong as an industrial designer, specialising for the past few years in children’s toys and baby strollers. It’s not a regular sort of nine-to-five job, he says; he’ll think about the things he’s designing at all hours. For years, he would paint as a way to switch off, retiring to his home studio and creating huge oil-on-canvas works depicting scenes with people – strangers – in them. Each painting might take a month to complete, though. “Very lonely work,” he says.
Niu hasn’t picked up a paintbrush since he picked up a camera for the first time during the pandemic. He started photographing what he calls “interesting street moments” while out on walks with his kelpie, Joydi (named by one of his daughters after a favourite band, Joy Division). “I quickly realised, catching photos is far more interesting than sitting in the studio painting,” he says. (Catching photos: isn’t that a brilliant word to describe the process of recording these fleeting, serendipitous moments.) His work has earned him an award in Capture Magazine’s Australasian Top Emerging Photographers 2024.
A couple of these images are from his first visit to the Melbourne Cup, last year. Late afternoon on cup day proved to be a very happy hunting ground. “Beautiful outfits, lots of people a little bit crazy, drunken!” he says. He’s looking forward to going back on Tuesday, to see what he might catch.
To see more of David Niu’s work, see his Instagram page at
https://www.instagram.com/davids_art_street/?hl=en
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