‘Can I Call It Home’, Emmanuel Serna debut book, published by Brownie Publishing, Hong Kong, presents a collection of intimate snapshots of Hong Kong, each image a quiet story, capturing the city’s rhythm, character, and everyday life.

Though born and raised in France, Hong Kong holds a special place for Emmanuel Serna. He has called the city home for 15 years — it is where he met his wife, and where they began their family. His photographs of the city are therefore deeply personal: intimate, nuanced depictions that stand far removed from the familiar tourist clichés.

Captured over the course of a decade and a half, this body of work reflects Serna’s ongoing contemplation of his adopted home and its inhabitants. How do they act in their daily lives when freed from external pressures? What relationships and interactions do they maintain with public space? How do they occupy it, and what temporary or permanent traces do they leave behind? How do they manage to feel at home in places beyond the confines of their apartments or houses? In essence, how can they truly be themselves?

In a city where private space is scarce, some residents deliberately claim public spaces or natural areas — appropriating and reshaping them, temporarily or permanently, in their own image. While private spaces remain enclosed, guarded, and secret — locked doors, security cameras, watchful guards — public spaces are open and exposed, allowing everyone to act almost as they please.

It is these moments of everyday life that Serna seeks to capture and translate through his lens, always subjectively. Ultimately, the project also represents his own introspection — a quiet reflection, through photography, on his place within this city. After all these years, is he now a Hongkonger, or still a foreigner observing Hongkongers?