People First Bank Photographic Awards: Clement Chua’s shot

Rush hour in the city is like a human tide: twice a day there’s a great ebb and flow of bodies as we hit the streets en masse.

Picture: Clement Chua

Think of rush hour in the city as like a human tide: twice a day there’s a great ebb and flow of bodies as we hit the streets en masse, in vehicles or on foot, heading ­between work, school and home. It’s ­Clement Chua’s job as a ­traffic engineer in Melbourne to ensure this human tide moves smoothly. He identifies problems at junctions and ­intersections, the choke points that cause congestion, and irons them out. “It’s about managing the flow, to make it easy for people,” he says.

Picture: Clement Chua

Chua, 43, shot this image – winner of the Connection category in the People First Bank Photographic Awards – at evening rush hour on a Friday. He was standing outside the State Library of Victoria, waiting to meet friends and go out for dinner, when he looked down La Trobe Street and noticed how ­gorgeous it looked: the tram tracks gleaming in the golden sunlight, the shadows and silhouettes of commuters making their way to and from Central station. (He shot the scene with a telephoto lens, hence the “compressed” perspective.) You can ­almost feel the great exhale of relief at ­another working week finished, can’t you?

Chua, who grew up in Kuching in ­Malaysian Borneo, has worked all over the world as a traffic engineer, including in ­England, Singapore, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia and Basra in Iraq; for the past 10 years, he’s lived in Melbourne’s Carlton. “I love this city – the culture, the food, the whole vibe of the place,” he says. “It feels like home to me now.” He always has his camera close to hand, for who knows when the city will gift you something like this? “When people think of sunsets, it’s usually at the beach or in the mountains,” he says. “But actually sunsets in the city can be ­really beautiful too.”