Photographer Benny Lam has documented the suffocating living conditions in Hong Kong’s subdivided flats, recording the lives of these hidden communities
- ‘I’m still alive and yet I am already surrounded by four coffin planks!’ … Hong Kong’s cage home tenants. All photographs: Benny Lam
- Cage homes are minuscule rooms lived in by the poorest people in the city. Over the last 10 years, the number of cage homes made of wire mesh has decreased, but they’ve been replaced by beds sealed with wooden planks
- These small, wooden boxes of 15 sq ft, are known as ‘coffin cubicles’
- A 400 sq ft flat can be subdivided to accommodate nearly 20 double-decker sealed bed spaces
- The tenants are different ages and sexes – all unable to afford a small cubicle, which would allow more room to stand up
- A kitchen-toilet complex in a cage home
- The photographs highlight the reality of Hong Kong’s housing crisis, where tens of thousands of people live in these cramped conditions because they can’t afford anything else
- Many cage home residents awake to the cruel reality that all the shimmer and prosperity of Hong Kong is out of reach
- An estimated 100,000 people in Hong Kong live in inadequate housing, according to the Society for Community Organisation (SoCO)
- These photographs were taken for SoCO, an NGO fighting for policy changes and decent living standards in the city
- Benny Lam’s series Trapped was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet 2017
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