Artist Peijin Chen takes it from behind. Photographs that is. Exhibition of Chen's work at Arch Cafe numero uno. Starts at 8pm.

Call it a failure of nerve or a chutzpah deficiency, but it has always been hard for me to take pictures of people from the front. In the history of art, the head—meaning the front—has, since antiquity, been privileged as the seat of the soul, whereas the back of the head has meant just about nothing. Yet the view from behind is not without its charms: the anonymity it imposes on the characters in the pictures gives them a certain universality, and there is also a sense in which these are pictures of imminent departures and unexpected leave-takings—on the part of the photographer as much as the subjects. These occasions—or are they continual moments?—are created by photographs and then confirmed by memory, a strange reversal and that which makes the medium so interesting in the first place.