Photography: Eerie photographs of the cemeteries towering over Hong Kong

On a busy day in any city walking down the street can feel a bit like you’re a sardine in a tin making an ineffectual bid for freedom, but we often forget just how roomy London actually is. Hong Kong, on the other hand, has one of the densest populations in the world, and they’re quite literally running out of room – so much so, in fact, that its cemeteries have grown into towering affairs teetering on the edges of its monumental hills, with graves stacked one on top of the other like classical amphitheatres.

These were the classical structures which first popped into Manuel Alvarez Diestro’s mind when considering the city’s eery skyline; he photographed ten of the city’s cemeteries at the hours of dawn and dusk during the rainy season to emphasise their gloomy demeanour. The combination of the cemeteries’ overbearing presence and the way they seem to blend in with the colossal skyscrapers which surround them has the effect of making the world of the living seem to coexist with the dead. Creepy stuff.