Pond Musings

Portraits as Visual Drama November 2011

2011-11-18T08:12:00.001+08:00

Last weekend I taught Portraits as Visual Drama again for Objectifs. I can't really remember how many times I have taught this course now. But my last batch of students were pretty gungho and I thought it would be nice to share some of their images from the class.

Thanks to the models Adeline, Christina, Dominic and Zhi Hao. The projections were from an installation by Ric Aw.

Sven Ludolphi

Sean Yeo


Robert Volger

Robert Van Delden


Robert Baird

Marielle Veldhuis


Divya Raghuram


Clement Chia


Ben Lee

Continuing the photographic journey

2011-10-01T00:53:00.000+08:00

I guess that I have been on a break from blog posts. Most of my blog posts in my hectic days was about the journey of photography. I shared what I was going through and what I was thinking. I took a year off to travel last year and that I blogged on my Singapore to Europe blog. And then things went quite because my time was taken up by an illness in my family. I did a few posts about the frailty of life, but I did not do so much.

I am working on some personal photographic projects now. It is a bit hard to blog about it in the midst of the projects because it is all new to me and the process is hazy. It took me a while before I got some insight into photography and started blogging about it. So it will take a while before I figure out what I am doing with my new direction in photography.

But I am now exploring the Black Art of printing. Up until now, I have been able to make simple calibrations of my screen and make ball park prints of my images. A lot of my images ended up in digital format anyway and the printing was done by someone else if at all. For more high end prints for my exhibitions, I would get Chris Yap from Light Editions to make my prints for me. But I always had this feeling that my eye for output is still untrained. And I was always at the mercy of the people printing the images for me. Some like Chris were good, some from some commercial labs were bad. And I do not even know what it is that I do not know to make the printing better. I hope that in time when I start competing my projects, I will be able to exhibit my work. And in that sense, I realize that I need to take responsibility of the final prints. Even if I do end up sending my photos out to be printed by someone else, I had better know what it is that I need from the printer and how to express my needs. A new journey begins.

The best photographic printers, the machines, are made by Epson. Unfortunately, the documentation is sparse. And the interface between the computer and the printers are not always obvious. I mean, is my intent 'Colormetric' or 'Perceptual', I do not rightly know. And if all photographers vaguely know that we need to color manage our work flow, it is possible to 'manage' color twice and make a balls of the final results. Even the simple act of calibrating the monitor, is not simple. What color temperature should we aim for? What is the maximum lumen?

I have decided to blog about my journey into the Black art of printing. And because we all have different computers, screens, printers and paper preferences, my experience is unlikely to be template for all people printing. But hopefully the concepts will be useful and at least some of the specifics will be useful to some people.

Staring into the Abyss

2011-08-20T17:40:00.001+08:00

I must admit, I am confronting my mortality and I am afraid. This is not a morbid daydream of mine, but it is now in my everyday experience. My eighty year old father had a stroke last September and although he is recovering, he will not be the same man than before his stroke. And my mother, who is healthy for her age, has to be checked for cancer. But even more immediate is a friend of my age having stage 1 stomach cancer which he was lucky enough to find and remove. And a younger friend who has stage 4 cancer. By some miracle chemotherapy worked and she is well, thankfully. And also a photographer friend has had a tumor removed from her brain. No, I do not think I am being morbid, mortality is on my thoughts. To think that death is something that will only come to others is a denial. Somehow consciousness of my own mortality is something that I have to deal with.

Maybe thinking about death is also a luxury of my circumstances. I am financially stable and I do not have a family to bring up at the moment. In the midst of day to day struggles, mortality may not impinge on people's consciousness because they have more immediate issues on their minds, children to raise, rent to pay. I also have had friends who have told me there is a reason why people need religion. I understand that sentiment, life on earth, in spite of the advances of man, is still painful and brutal. Even the most fortunate people will have to deal with the end of their lives, there are no exceptions. But my rational mind simply cannot accept the promise of a heaven based on faith. I have no talks with God to soothe my troubled soul. The pillar of my life, my spiritual guide till now, my father has had a stroke. The stroke is on the right side of his brain and after being a meditation master and healer for many years, he is now unable to meditate. As happy as I am to still physically have my father, who is adorable at eighty and in his second childhood, I have lost my closest councilor. My father is facing his own predicament and now it is my turn to hold his hand and tell him that everything will be OK.

My immediate response to this trauma has been typical of myself. It is to work harder. I am no longer working for other people in photography. But I have a long list of personal photographic projects and I have launched myself into them. Desperately filling my mind with practical concerns instead of unavoidable existential ones. I think that I am clutching at life, at any sign that there is breath in my body and my heart is still pumping. Work is having to attend to practicalities, needing to get my camera kit in order, needing to negotiate the terms of my photographic engagements. It is about doing things that is within my power to do. But I am no longer young and naive. I have been fortunate to have my share of success. I was a popular wedding photographer and I have been published in International magazines. And as nice as all that is, it is true that a photographer is only as good as his last photograph. Success does not give one immortality. Recently I read that Nan Goldin used to take photographs of her friends in order to keep them alive, but it did not work. Money, success, pleasures of the flesh are but mere diversions from the finality of death. It is the nature of the world to move on, and as famous as anyone can be, they will at best be a footnote in some history book. But for most of us mere mortals, we will live on for awhile in the memories of friends and loved ones, also to disappear when they disappear in turn.

And is it depressing and black to consider these thoughts? Shakespeare was right when he said,

"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages."

On some level we are just acting our roles in life, filling the time between birth and death. But I think if we can cast aside the ego that tells us we are some divine being with the possibility of life eternal or that we are capable of greatness, then we can begin to truly appreciate life. The wonder of life is in each moment of our living.

What do I mean by that? For example, each weekend now I spend time taking my parents out for meals. And as much as eating is a mundane affair that we can go through as a functional necessity. But sharing meals with my parents are important to me. Sharing time with the couple that birthed me and brought me up. It is not a national event or a great scientific discovery, but each moment of sharing a meal is the definition of being human. It is a true sacred exchange between one generation and another.

I think that accepting the temporary nature of life, one begins to truly understand the meaning of 'Yesterday is but a dream, tomorrow is in the imagination, we have only the present'. When we stop living in the past or keep looking for a future happiness, we can concentrate on now. Each breath we take, each sip of coffee and each conversation we have becomes a true experience. And it is transitory. We cannot cling on to the memory of a love or live for a future love. In the midst of now, we simply are, and that is wonderful in itself.

And then I realize also that throwing myself at various projects was an act of blind panic. And while it can help me forget for a moment mortality, it does not help deal with the underlying fear. I have to stop the emotional hysteria and simply accept what life is. I have actually started on awareness meditation daily, but I am not the type of person to give my whole life over to meditation. At least not the type of meditation where I simply sit the whole day in meditation. But I have decided to live my life more deliberately and being more aware as I undertake my photographic projects and daily routines. I also begin to understand that it is not about my projects gaining validation by winning awards or be lauded by critics, it is about taking photographs that are meaningful to me, that increase my awareness of the world and my place in it. And I believe that living my life with focused awareness will make me more alive and give meaning to what I do. In some ways I am paraphrasing 'The Power of Now' by Eckhart Tolle. But it is only by being confronted with death and accepting the nature of life, then does living in now make sense to me. As long as one has the means to live, then fame, status and huge fortunes are ultimately meaningless.

I believe that life is temporary and that it will end. People have died before me and people will die after I have died. And all that is okay! It is good to simply live each moment, experience it for what it is and then let it go. All moments, good or bad, will pass. And now I am more accepting of all of my life, including its ultimate end. And I respect each moment of my life more than I used to.

Documenting the Man Theatre Festival

2011-07-25T19:27:00.000+08:00

I have spent much time taking publicity or production photographs for various performing arts groups in Singapore. And I am happy that there are other photographers stepping up to take on this work. But due to the tight budget of performing arts groups, documentation of the production process has rarely been done for productions. So I have started to step into the gap and document the process for performing arts groups. I started off this work with Singapore Dance Theatre which is the group I am most associated with. And when I saw the line up for Wild Rice's Man Theatre Festival, I offered to help document the production process. And my offer was accepted to cover the two productions that Wild Rice is preparing for the Festival, The Weight of Silk on Skin and Cooling Off Day. The first play is a Monologue written by Huzir Sulaiman, directed by Claire Wong and performed by none other than the artistic Director of Wild Rice, Ivan Heng. The other play is an ensemble piece by playwright Alfian Sa'at based on the recent landmark Singaporean elections. It boasts a cast of veteran actors like Neo Swee Lin and Peter Sau. It's director, Jo Kukathas also acts in the play.

Even though I have been around performing arts groups so much and so many of my friends are actors, dancers and musicians, I have not really been a witness to the birthing process of plays. I entered the rehearsal building of Wild Rice on Kerbau Road with two rehearsal rooms on the second floor. The first sight that greeted me when I reached the top of the flight of stairs is a table with neat stacks of plastic cups labelled with the names of actors and production crew. And the cups were color co-ordinated for the two productions, red for Cooling off Day and Blue for The Weight of Silk on Skin. An irony to use Red for a play titled 'Cooling' and blue for a play peppered with allusions to hot sex? But I digress. The neatly labelled cups hint at the professionalism of the company. Another hint was the neat list of personnel in each play found in each rehearsal room. Already, you can see that Wild Rice is a focused organization, but not overly so because it is also a creative place.

In the rehearsal room for Cooling off Day, is a chart with the names of characters from the play and next to those characters, the name or names of the actor who would play the character. The rehearsal started later than scheduled when I first arrived, with only the stage manager there. She happened to be a Lasalle graduate whose graduation portrait I had taken. Then old friends arrive, Peter Say, Kheng Hua and Swee Lin. New to me is the actor Najib and the director Jo. The rehearsals started with the actors standing in a group, playing the roles of Singaporeans talking about the elections. Some of them were for the PAP and some were against. The actors read the scripts like they were trying out new clothes, adjusting a line or delivery like one would adjust the sleeves of a new shirt. And the director Jo, coaxing a form out of this ensemble performance. She was clear that the characters had to be distinct from one another so that they would not become a monotonous delivery. And at the same time, both director and actors were aware that the delivery had to be authentic, believable. And I noticed Kheng Hua, shifting with nervous energy while waiting to deliver her lines, not because she was nervous but because this was a way for her to emotionally find resonance with her character.

The playwright Alfian came in half way and sat watching the rehearsal. It was obvious that he enjoyed seeing his characters coming to life. And he was also very much part of the theatrical birthing process, explaining the rationale behind parts of his script and clarifying the characters, many which were based on interviews with real people.

With so much experience in the room, each actor brought a wealth of life to their roles. The process of directing was not a dictatorship but more like a conductor coaxing the essence out of a well honed orchestra. And even though I knew how talented the people in the room are, I was still astounded by how versatile and malleable they were under the directions.

Entering the rehearsal room for The Weight of Silk on Skin was immediately more intense. A table of four production crew and Ivan sitting on the edge of a seat, running lines. I always wondered about that process of learning lines, almost to the point of dotting the 'i's and crossing the 't's. And then it hits me that the effortless delivery of lines, complete with believable character, is akin to a ballerina who makes floating en pointe look effortless. Both are herculean tasks made to look simple. There was no need for anyone to create drama for my camera, this was an actual battle as visceral as any life and death struggle found on National Geographic.

When I later asked Ivan whether remembering lines has become harder or easier, he replies that it has never been easy for him but he has a physical memory of the play. He remembers blocking more easily which helps him remember his lines. And this explains why acting is not simply oration, but an act that requires the whole body.

Claire and HuzirHuzir, experienced professionals, discussed the play on myriad levels, asking questions that I would never have thought to ask. The script writer's intention brought to life by an actor and honed to a razor's edge by the director. And this was no easy script. Huzir is extremely intelligent, his script while on one level being a human drama, is equally full of detail on clothing, fabric production and social anthropology. A heady mix which a new actor would never be able to bring to life. Ivan though, even while struggling with some of the newer lines, was mesmerizing to watch. And Claire was able to keep up with the extent of Ivan's delivery and reshape it. The process was a drama as compelling as the play itself.

More than half way through

2011-05-25T18:46:00.002+08:00

Death is like that big elephant in the room we are all trying to ignore. I did not meet my maternal grandmother. I barely remember my paternal grandmother. I remember that I was very young when I paternal grandfather passed away, and I had no comprehension of life, let alone death. So I knew that something big happened at his funeral, but I did not know what. It was only my maternal grandfather, whom I had any interaction with. And I was a little sad when he passed away, but my life had barely begun. There was education ahead of me, a career and the rest of life. Mortality in a civilized country like Singapore, was just not something to dwell on for a young person. And it would seem that anyone who is alive, simply does not want to think about it. When I first started working as a photographer, I worked with the Tsao Foundation to document old folks. And in spite of the fact that old folks in Singapore are relatively well taken care off, and the staff found the images I took hopeful, some outside members of the public were repelled by the images. Was it because I shot in black and white, or is it simply because, healthy people do not want to contemplate the end? I can understand a general public not wanting to see murder victims or people with other terminal illnesses, but age is something we all do. The usage of my images was limited as it was thought that it would not help fund raising.

Well, perhaps while living, we should live for the moment, concentrate on now. But recently my father has suffered a stroke. How do I ignore that? Up until the stroke, everything was under control. After the stroke, his diabetes, high blood pressure, prostrate, sodium levels, all part of a fragile machinery, become issues. I must say that my dad has done pretty well health wise, but at eighty, I guess it was inevitable that his body starts to deteriorate. Now this was no longer my grandfather, this is my father, the foundation of my family. And even though this stroke was relatively minor and he is slowly recovering, this has shaken me. I have just read the book 'My stroke of Insight', where the author had a massive stroke on the left hemisphere of her brain. The left side is the logical side and the author had found in the right hemisphere an inner peace. Ironically for my father, a long time meditator and all round calm person, his minor stroke was in the right hemisphere. He is unable to meditate and he has become emotional. In this sense, the anchor of my family, has become unstuck, keeping calm in the family now requires large amounts of paddling. And in some small way, I have already lost my father. He is still here for sure, and his actions and his words still come through, but things will just never be the same again.

And if my eighty year old father suffering an illness is expected, then the real wake up call is that a couple of my friends have stomach cancer. Fortunately they have been able to treat their cancers, but this is no longer a distant possibility. I do remember hearing that a college friend of mine dying of a heart attack in her twenties. But this was an unfortunate congenital condition. It was an 'accident' in the sense that it was out of the norm. However, it is now obvious that death walks amongst us, amongst the people of my age group. We cannot take our health for granted. I went to have a check up on my eyes, finding that I had become long sighted and I got these headaches. I was worried of having a stroke, but I was told that it was normal for people past their forties to become long sighted. The truth is that the descent has begun. This not a morbid thought, it is not something to panic about, it is simply a fact. It is a fact that we are mortal.

Contemplating the end is a sobering thought. I guess worrying about how my life will unravel at the end can be the stuff of night mares, but that is a wasted effort. Knowing that I am mortal is actually a good thing. It makes me treasure life and it is making me think hard about my priorities. The important thing is not to let morbid fear paralyze me. I may or may not have a pleasant ending, worrying about it will not change it. But right here, right now, I have choices to be made. When we are young, we have an abundance of energy and no experience. We can try many things out, aim for the peaks of many distant mountains and afford to hit a few dead ends. At this point of time, I have to decide what is important. Why should I get out of bed in the morning, and just what mountain do I want to scale? Heck, is it even worth scaling a mountain?

In my own experience, just what is it that matters? Fame, like winning awards or having millions of social network likes, is fleeting. Pleasures of the flesh, intense as they can be, are transient. Past a certain level, money has diminishing returns. It really is not the end points that matter, the place where things can be tabulated. For a while now, the photographs that I have been taking are not as important as the process of taking them. Take for example, my overland journey in 2010. Having the photographs from the journey is nice, and I do want to exhibit them. But it was the journey, that counted. The act of going from country to country, meeting new people and experiencing new sights. It was for me a way to experience life fully. To keep engaged in being human and understand what other humans are experiencing. I am continuing my photography now, but it is not the photographs that are my aim, but the experiences and insights that I gain from the process of creating them. Why do I make some photographs, what is the process of making them, what does it mean? What can I share with other people with my photography? The same goes with my relationships. I am not interested in being with the in crowd. I do not want to be seen in a certain way. I am not looking for networking opportunities. I am looking for quality time with my friends and family, ways of sharing and making life richer by weaving bridges of understanding. I want to share the good and the bad.

I guess that what I am trying to say is that I realize that I have to live my life to the fullest so that I will have no regrets at the end. And living life to the full is not some big fancy thing, but it really is simply being engaged in the act of living. I want to keep pushing as much as I am able to, but it is more focussed. I am no longer blasting off like a shot gun, but I am a sniper, with a specific target. Mortality is not good or bad, it is a fact. We all just have to deal with it. I know that I am probably more than half way through.

Making a stand

2010-11-25T12:30:00.000+08:00

Those who know me or have read my bio somewhere would know that I consider myself an accidental photographer. I did not start with a burning desire to take photographs, I was just like the normal tourist photographer, taking photos on holidays for some memories. But my love of dance and that need to record my love of dance was the reason I became a better photographer. It was a pleasure, an act of love.

In my pursuit of a certain form of beauty in dance, I set up a studio, and ran a business for eight years till I finally put on my exhibition 'Dance Me Through the Dark'. I had to learn studio lighting and work on many dance projects to get to my goal. I shot for performing arts groups which is natural for what I wanted to do. But I also became a wedding photographer, a corporate photographer and even did some commercial jobs. And in running a business, I had to manage staff, promote myself, keep the office running. It was draining all round but it was a good learning experience that I do not regret doing. But the truth is that I did not enter photography to run a business. Photography, because of my love of dance, was an exploration of a personal passion. A very simple, naive ideal.

This year, I made a long term dream come through by traveling overland from Singapore to Europe. Due to various circumstances, I had to use air travel in certain parts of the journey, but this was still without a doubt a journey of a lifetime for me. And after years of putting energy into running a business and training myself, I was not just having a holiday, I was pondering what is the most important thing in life and what am I doing with the resources I have?

What the journey through so many countries taught me is that there is beauty and there is hope in the world. Even in the harsh country of Mongolia, that last winter suffered a winter so cold it wiped out one quarter of their livestock, the people persevered. And when I talked to the Mongolians, they were proud of their country, they loved it. When I told my guide that Mongolia is a harsh country, she said 'Yes, but it is beautiful'. And I met other people, other friends who through adversity still hope and still love. And the most important thing is that people stay true to themselves or what they are.

As much as I have grown in running a photography business, there is no love in it for me. I hope for nothing here. There is no love, fewer learning experiences and not enough money to tempt me into prostituting myself. It was clear that the past way of doing things was not something to return to. But knowing not to go back does not mean knowing how to go forward.

Although my goal for many years of capturing the beauty of dance had led me to produce work that I am proud of, I also learned new things in craft and had a deepening understanding of photography. I grew up. It was apparent after Dance Me Through the Dark, that there can be more depth in my personal work. The beauty of Dance is an ivory tower, worth ascending to, but cut off from the rest of the human experience. And damn it, what was once an adrenalin rush, had become an exercise. After achieving my goal, I was empty and lost in the wilderness. There is no other way to describe it.

And then one year in Tuscany, I took a workshop with Anders Peterson. He forced me to stop hiding behind my camera. He forced me to accept my own feelings of happiness, sadness, love, the animal instincts. Photography is secondary to living. It is like the ability to walk, useless unless there is a place one needs to walk to. And this meeting inspired me to try a revolution. To explore the fringes of society looking for a more raw, visceral experience. But after two years of searching for a way into this other world, I realised that this was unnatural for me. I simply do not belong in that world coming from a comfortable family background. And I simply do not have what it takes to become part of an alternative society. I got a wonderful hint from Anders about the possibilities of life and photography, but I still had to find my own path.

I think that I understood deep inside me what I needed to do. Actually Anders did say to me that my path could be a fusion of dance and raw experience. Before my long overland journey, I had already started a project called Night Song. I was trying to express the longings, moments of happiness and periods of sad loneliness while working with dancers. On this long journey I did a detour back to Tuscany and took a workshop with Arno Minkkinen and I did a series of images about the importance of dance and freedom to my life. And it worked. The slowly welling conviction in me became clear. I would use dance and photography to explore my own personal life. And I can also use dance and photography to explore other people's lives and experiences.

Which brings me to now. Now I am refreshed and I am once again excited to make images. And I believe that my new direction will not just help me grow as an image maker, but also as a human being. I am making a stand now, I am going to concentrate on personal work. I will not go back to corporate, wedding or family portraiture. It hinders me. I will still shoot for arts groups and artists though. They are like my family and they are also my collaborators in my personal work. But time is becoming precious to me and the most important thing in my life is to live my life fully.

Carpe Diem!

A quote from Paolo Roversi

2010-06-22T17:25:00.000+08:00

My studio is a rectangular room with a high ceiling, old wooden parquet flooring, and a large window facing north. It is like a tiny theatre with an empty stage, a space to be filled, a time yet to be invented, a proscenium where everything is possible, no trick disallowed, where neither seasons, nor days, not hours exist. Here all temporal boundaries dividing live and imitation, reality and fiction, dissolve. Like any art worthy of the name, the most brazen lie can evolve into surprising and seductive truth. The furnishings are modest: two stools, a carport, some chairs, two or three lights, and an old blanket, which is my favorite backdrop. It can be a wall, a road, a field, sky, night, fear, wind… a screen for dreams. The studio is not only in this room; it is anywhere I put my camera on my tripod and my tripod on the ground, liberating my heart and mind. The studio is far more than a workplace or a tool of my trade. It is above all a state of being and feeling. The studio is everywhere. It is the corner of my mind. I have a very mystic and spiritual approach to photography, which I can't explain, and I don't need to. I like to keep things unrevealed, I like sometimes to lose myself into the indefinite. That often happens to me along the path of beauty, without every truly understanding where to proceed, and the further I manage to see, the deeper the mystery becomes. Photography goes beyond the limits of reality and illusion. It brushes up against another life, another dimension, revealing not only what is there but was is no there. Every photograph is an encounter, an intimate, reciprocal confession. I like long exposures to allow the should all the time it needs to rise to the surface, and to let chance have its way. Always, photographs surprise me; they never turn out quite the way I imagine they might. Every photograph enters the world as a sign of hope. It is late, very late. Everyone has left, and a strange silence has descended. I wander aimlessly around the deserted studio trying to bring some order to ideas and objects, but the natural and permanent chaos exerts its power. I put on my jacket, turn out the light, and close the door. But where does the light go? Silence… Darkness is the light's silence.

Paolo Roversi

Variegated Realities

2010-02-19T23:15:00.003+08:00

A project by Students from Nanyang Technological University.
20-25 February 2010

http://afexhibitions.blogsome.com/2010/02/12/variegated-realities/

This exhibition is on on for 5 days! But it is worth seeing to see what thoughtful and engaging work is about. I think the photographers, who are young, can do with more living. But I like the honesty in their work.

There is an exhibition on at Orchard Central, which I think will appeal to the mass audience, but I found really boring. Pretty pictures, but forgettable.

Daniel Murtagh, photographer

2010-02-07T14:30:00.003+08:00

Daniel Murtagh, photographer

I Wish..

2010-02-05T12:37:00.002+08:00

Image by Saul Leiter

I got a thank you postcard and a gift of a Saul Leiter book in the post today. This is from Joyce Ho, a photographer with a love for plants. Last year, I had talked to her about some questions she had about work.

I do not know why, but young photographers have started to look to me for advice. And quite often, it is about how to survive as a photographer in Singapore. This bothers me, because I have not figured a way to survive in Singapore as a photographer unless you like commercial work, wedding or photojournalism. Oh yes, you can be an art photographer and teach too. But photography in Singapore is not for the faint-hearted. As easy as it is to buy a camera and call oneself a photographer, living off a camera is hard. Yes, it is possible if you really are truly the top of your field and can market yourself effectively. I know a few good photographers who are sinking in Singapore because they are not willing to market themselves or have not found someone to market themselves.

I was talking to my friend Chris Yap about that. He simply told me that if people wanted to earn a living from photography, then they are in it for the wrong reason. And it struck me, that it is not for me to get people to survive in this tough circumstance. The photographers that survive do it because they love it, the live photography, they breath photography. I have very little advice for working in Singapore, beyond polishing one's photography and effectively marketing yourself. In this age of photographic democracy, one needs to work like a dog to distinguish one's self. If the practices of a photographer is uneconomic, then the photographer will not remain a photographer for long. Just so you know, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and Diane Arbus, all legendary names in photography were relatively poor in their lifetimes. There are a handful of commercial photographers like Avedon who made a decent living from their work, and some German school art photographers that command incredible amounts of money for their images. But it is like the lottery, we idolize the winner, but there are thousands and thousands of people who did not win the lottery.

The purpose of my photography is not to make money, it is because I have images in me that need to get out. I do not take pictures, pictures take me, I am like an instrument. But to enable for the images I make to come out, I find some way to survive. And it is not glamorous, and it is not easy. And always, it is an intensely personal journey, something that cannot be taught. So at the end of the day, all I can be is like an alcoholic, sharing his story with others in Alcoholics Anonymous. All there is is to affirm that photographers before me have walked this difficult route, my own route has been difficult, and it is on par if a new photographer has a difficult route. But the rewards, the sights that a photographer is privileged to see, is beyond the wealth that money can buy. And I find that if photography is used to make human bridges, the relationships made are more comfortable than any material comfort.

Photography is secondary to living

2010-02-02T17:36:00.000+08:00

Photography is secondary to living

This is an interview I had with the fotoflock web site.

After ten years

2010-01-22T18:13:00.004+08:00

I am still looking forward and that tends to make me dismiss all my work that has come before. But someone has asked me about my work and I had to look back at what I have done. And I guess that I am happy that I took these photos.

Photographic Exhibitions in Singapore in January

2010-01-16T20:29:00.005+08:00

There is a lot going on in terms of photographic exhibitions this month.

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To begin with there is a photography of German Dance Photography at the Goethe Institute.It is interesting how German photographer's work always looks more raw and technically simple, but actually is of the highest order.

Movements Frozen in Time. An Exhibition of Dance Images

Photo Exhibition
14.01.2010 - 27.02.2010
Monday-Friday 9am-6.30pm
Saturday 1pm-6pm
Goethe-Institut Singapore, Art Gallery
163 Penang Road #05-01
Winsland House II
Singapore 238463
Free admission
+65 67354555

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I have not seen this yet but I really want to before it ends. This is part of the M1 Fringe Festival.

Last Meals
by Jonathon Kambouris
07.01.2010 - 24.01. 2010
5.45am - 12.15am
Esplanade Tunnel

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This is a nice and fresh exhibition in a new exhibition space. Apparently this is an exhibition of six photographers who are showing their work for their first time. It includes award winning photographers Elaine Lim and John Heng. The other photographers are Fusheng, Genevieve Ding, Nicholas Foo and Wong King Leong.

I met the curator, Nicholas Foo, who is new to photography but very enthusiastic. He calls himself a noob and has his work on the wall too as the owners of the gallery asked him to put up his work. He tried shooting dinner for the photographers who were gallery sitting, Fusheng and King Leong. I passed him a paper napkin to soften his flash. Amusing yeah?

Anyway, I enjoyed it because the images were fresh and unpretentious. I hope to see more work from these photographers, including the noob curator!

my|4-walls: more than just a photo exhibition

17.01.2010 - 21.01.2010
Muse The Art Gallery

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Objetifs is having the regular student exhibition, BUD. Some of my students from the Portraits as Drama class have the photos up. Well done boys and girls.

BUD
14.01.2010-12.02.2010
Objeticfs Centre for Photography and Filmmaking

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I guess that since I am plugging other people's exhibitions that I should plug my own. I have a mini exhibition of male nudes at a gay bar, Does Your Mother Know. It is 10 photos of dancer Robert Mills who was until recently dancing for Singapore Dance Theatre. The exhibition is on till after Chinese New Year.

Paolo Roversi

2010-01-11T18:06:00.003+08:00

I have been waiting for Paolo Roversi's web site to be up for a long time. And it finally is. Paolo just takes some of the most beautiful photographs.

Go to www.paoloroversi.com.

At this time

2010-01-08T20:33:00.005+08:00

I have not been blogging much in 2009. I would like to have done more and have more to share, but the last year was a year of pleasantly getting by. The biggest change came at the end of 2008 when I let go of most of my staff. 2009 just drifted by for me. I did continue shooting for performing arts groups and families. The highlight being the photography for the Genee International ballet competition. I also rented the studio out. That was a blast when the British Council staged An Interview with Adrienne in my studio. And I also rented the studio out to Steve McCurry to run his workshop during the month of photography. And I taught quite a lot in 2009. The highlight of the teaching was having a noise apprentice, Guo Jie. I saw something special in the way he sees things and I hope that I managed to help in connect that seeing with life more.

With the world financial crisis, the feet have been knocked out from under the photographic industry. This is not an independent thing, photography all over the world has been undergoing a democratic revolution, moving from the domain of specialised professionals to the ubiquity of everyone taking photos on their phone, the computer or their mp3 player. Being a professional photographer, with the exception of the top end commercial photographers, is an extremely difficult way to make money. I went back to being a freelancer for personal reasons, but if I had kept my company large in 2009, I would have been forced by circumstances to let my staff go, and the whole experience would have been much more painful. As illogical as it may sound, 2009, without a major plan, without large corporate shoots, was the best financial year for me. Lots of people look only at the potential earnings, but forget the overheads. Without large overheads, lower paying jobs, teaching and rental all add up. So I have found a way to survive in this environment. And I have freed myself up to pursue my own vision.

The greatest challenge before me is not a financial one but a personal one. I have been inspired by Anders Peterson to live life more, and not live life behind the camera. But my life is mundane, and the pictures are not that compelling. I do think though the photos that I have been taking with my iphone have their charm. The challenge for me has been how to live life better.

Although 2009 was not a hectic year, I still had too much to do. It was hard to find space to re-orientate myself. This year, 2010, I am making a personal dream come through. I am taking 8 months off and traveling overland to London. I am already sure that it will be a unique journey for me and it will be a wonderful experience. But I think the point of the trip is not to find new vistas, it is to find myself.

This is what I think that the world community has to do too in these extraordinary times. Instead of going back to the old paradigm of capitalist consumerism, which is leading us to an irreparable environmental crisis, the world needs to find in self again, in community and in simple pleasures of life. I hope we find ourselves, before we are lost for ever.

Between Heaven and Earth by Cristina Garcia Rodero

2009-12-25T21:16:00.003+08:00

http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essay/between-heaven-and-earth

I cannot embed this video because it is too big. But it is beautiful.

Miru Kim's Underground art

2009-11-27T00:55:00.000+08:00

Demonstrations from Portraits as Visual Drama

2009-11-26T19:32:00.002+08:00

I teach a lighting course for Objectifs called 'Portraits as Visual Drama'. Here are a couple of demonstration shots from my last course. Yes, the fun crazy last course.

"Living with..." set up

2009-11-20T16:27:00.003+08:00

So we were at Vivocity last night setting up the "Living with..." exhibition. The exhibition looks good if I say so myself.

Living with...

2009-11-07T13:10:00.002+08:00

An Arts Against Aids Photographic exhibition
20-29 Nov 2009
Vivocity
South Avenue

This is a project that I have been working on for since the beginning of the year. And finally there will be an exhibition of photographs of people living with HIV. It has been an enriching experience. And I think that there is a nice range of photographs by eleven different photographers.

I have to thank AFA for giving me this opportunity to work on this project. And I also need to thank the photographers that helped out with teaching and mentoring, Hui Fen, Hui May, Maye-e, Terence, Luke and Bryan.

The photographer demonstrates

2009-11-05T12:53:00.003+08:00

Caught in my demo mode. I was shooting for a new line of yoga wear named Om Republic. The model is Ginny Gan, a dancer from SDT.

Thanks Irvin for catching me unawares!

Todd Hido

2009-10-26T10:57:00.003+08:00

Landscapes, interiors and nudes. A walk through the mind of Todd Hido.

Naked without an iphone and other thoughts

2009-10-19T17:22:00.005+08:00

I have not been posting many new entries for about half a year now. This is because I am in transition. I downsized my photography business and became a freelancer. On the career front, I have been working for various arts groups and doing personal portraits and this has turned out well for me, meaning that I am finanacially viable. As for personal work, I have been trying to find a new direction. I want to find a project where I learn more about the lives of other people. To this end I have been working with various organisations to teach photography and also to meet different people whom may be interesting to photograph, but nothing has really come up yet. But I have been reading and learning a lot and the iphone has become a very interesting means of self expression.

After being a professional photographer for so many years, picture quality has always been an issue for me. I never thought that at 2 megapixel camera on the iphone would be a sufficient tool for me and the initially the images coming out of the iphone tended to be washed out. However, the program Camera Bag changed my entire viewpoint of the iphone camera. There are several filters in Camera Bag but the one that I like the best is called Helga, which replicates the effect of a Holga camera. The results from the Helga filter is a square image which vignetted and the contrast increased, the results are simply lovely. The usefulness of such a camera was still in question because I did not know how well the images printed. I printed some test images onto A4 paper and was blown away. I suspect that I can also print my iphone images onto A3 but for the type of work that I am shooting with the iphone, A4 is actually just what I want. Those people who are my friends on Facebook will know that I am obsessed with iphone photography, I have uploaded about 700 images there. On flickr, you can see a small selection of my iphone images at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ngiapheng/sets/72157622141813198/.

On a recent trip to Europe, even though I was carrying around the very competent Olympus E-P1 around with me, the raw mood produced by the iphone was what I wanted time and again. There were times where I wanted to take an image full of detail, under low light or needing a longer lens (the iphone is effectively a wide angle lens) where I took out the E-P1, but 95% of the time I was whipping out the iphone. In its basic control, its direct response to a scene, there was an immediacy, a freedom that let me take personal images as I was living life. I was not 'stopping' my journey to take the photograph, making an image with the iphone was part of the exploration, part of the journey.

Now I am back in Singapore and I am in reservists. And as I am not allowed to bring in a telephone with a camera to camp, I feel naked. There is something missing for me. Which brings be to the next point.

I have heard some people comment that photographers are not really 'there' in a situation, that instead of experiencing what is happening they are pre occupied with the photography. And there is truth in that. I mean, what are people doing touring 10 countries in seven days. How does a person interact with a country or a culture in this short space of time? In this situation, what is a photograph? Is it an experience or is it a trophy, a tick on some travel checklist? So there is obviously a case for photography becoming a barrier to a exprience. And the irony is that one can become more and more involved with the technicality of photography, the sharpness, the amount of detail, and in this become more and more detached from the situation, the experience. As Anders Peterson puts it, a photographer hides behind his camera.

I think that my experience with personal photography right now comes from a different place. There still is commercial work where the camera is a tool for creating images to a brief and in that sense is impersonal. But I am a visual person, that is how I primarily interact with the world. I am constantly looking at things, seeing shapes, color and light. The outside visual experience has an intense impact on my emotions and my emotions has a strong impact on how I interpret outside visual experience. I am intensely curious by everyman, the daily concerns, the daily communications, the joy and pain of living. As a human, part of a small group of life who has self-conciousness and cognisance of death, I try in my own way to reconcile life and death. I am interested in how others traverse this journey from cradle to grave, the lows of human depravity, the highs of human potential and the spectrum of experience in between. So for me, what I see is a constant search for evidence of the human experience. Photography is much more than a visual token for me. It is the way I interact and interpret the world. And writers do this with their writing, musicians do that with their music, artists do this with whatever medium they work in. The sum of an artists' work is not and should not be the craft in their art. An artists' work should be the sum of their thoughts, their lives and their expriences. Good craft enables them to express all that in their art work. And good art will not just prompt the audience to appreciate the craft, although there is a portion of that, it should be a life changing experience for the audience in some way. It is the sharing of human experience.

So other than my iphone pictures, I have not been taking many photographs. But this does not mean that it has been an empty time for me. I have been going for French classes, I have been meeting various people and I have been reading. Recently I have read the biography of Diane Arbus, 'Why God won't go away', 'Norwegian' Wood by Harukami, 'Outliers' by Malcom Gladwell and I am in the midst of 'The Stuff of Thought' by Steven Pinker. I have been visiting galleries and not only enjoying the artwork of great artists, but also learning about what motivated them and how they lived their lives. And at this point, living life is what is important. Personal photography is not an end in itself, it simply is part of my life.

Quotes from an exhibition

2009-10-03T05:31:00.001+08:00

I went to an exhibition at the Leopold museum and saw these wonderful quotes.

For him, there were no empty hours, no hours that were mere bridges spanning to richer ones ahead, and nothing that lay worthless along his path, nothing he could pass by as a stranger. All things had turned their countenances towards him, were there for his sake, and he was incapable of detaching their fate from his own.
And more than that, he had only sought himself in all things and in all things only found himself.

Richard Beer-Hofman, The Death of George, 1900.

I will never, and certainly never under this administration, participate in an official exhibit... I want to free myself. I want my freedom back from all these unedifying and ridiculous matters which only keep me from my work. I want to stand up against the cavalier way artistic matters are dealt with by the Ministry of Education in the Austrian state. Every opportunity is taken to discourage real art and real artists. Only the weak and the false get sponsored. We need a clearly defined separation. The state has no right to act like a patron of the arts when its hand-outs are paltry, nor does it have the right to dictate what gets exhibited and under what terms. Its only duty is to act as intermediary and commercial factor; otherwise it is to leave all matter concerning artistic initiatives completely to artists. The civil servant has no business in the art schools..."

Gustav Klimt commenting on how his paintings for a university hall were rejected in 1905

Meaning is found solely by him who seeks it.
Into one another flow dream and waking,
Truth and falsehood. Certainty is nowhere.
We know naugh o others, nor of ourselves.
We are forever at play - he who knows that is the wiser!

Arthur Schnitzler, "Paracelsus", 1898

The awareness of visions is not just a state of mind
in which one realizes and perceives things,
but a state of mind where conscience perceives itself.

Oskar Kokoschka, "On the Nature of Visions", lecture 1912

What is important

2009-09-27T06:34:00.005+08:00

I just finished reading the biography of Diane Arbus and her life is so fascinating and tragic. But it highlighted the truth of how difficult it is to have a career in photography, or arts in general. The biography revealed how difficult it is for even established photographers to make living. But what struck me was a statement she made to her students in the last class she taught, "Nobody is going to love your pictures like yourself".

This statement is so close to home for me. My dance photography has always been in an uneasy niche. It is too polished, too technical to be in the realm of art photography. It is too raw, too instinctual to be commercial. The pursuit of dance photography has been a solitary pursuit for me in Singapore, only appreciated by a small group of people who love dance themselves.

And now, as I search for new horizons in my work, I have been working on personal research. I have been trying to search for a greater insight into the life of everyman, to create the work that would demand the attention of other people. But in this pursuit, I have not been successful. It could be early days yet.

However, what appears to be an insignificant toy in photographic terms, the iphone camera, has been an obsession with me. The iphone does not take good photos in general, the exposure and contrast is off. But when images are filtered using the Helga filter in a program called camera bag, the iphone images mimic the effect of a Holga camera. And the images print very nicely onto an A4 piece of paper.

On a certain level, the images that I take on the iphone are eye-candy. With respect to the drama of human existence and its tragedies, the images are insignificant. But for me, the iphone has become a constant companion, a way for me to comprehend, interact and transact with the life I live. My iphone photos are a very personal vision of my life. And in as much as I am a human, an everyman, these iphonographs reveal my honest alchemy with the world in which I live. So I lead a relatively good life, at the present moment with personal strife or danger and relatively sedate, but it is my life. And I am absolutely enjoying the beauty, the humour, the textures of the things that I have been fortunate enough to come across. Like a friend told me recently, I do not need to be a drug addict to take good photographs... or in other words I do not need to lead a dysfunctional life to make art.

I do appreciate more and more the life I have and I live it more intensely. But I am beginning to realise that I cannot, should not and will not court the forbidden or the dangerous, just to take more impactful photographs. It would be well and good if I did live a life full of human drama, but to purposefully, unnaturally, add drama where there is none, would be deceitful and self-serving.

Even with its limited appeal, I am proud of my dance images. And even if some of the images that I now take on my iphone seems too pretty and superficial, I must protest that they are still the results of my relentless, dogged pursuit of life. And as I make no apologies for living my life well, I will also make no apologies for the overt prettiness of my images. For if you look at all of them, you will see that as a whole, I am constantly exploring what it means to be alive, what it means to grow old and die, what does it mean to remember living and what does it mean to forget.

So often photographers are under the illusion that they choose the images that they take, but the truth is that the images choose us. One photographer may love another photographers work, but each photographer will still have his or her own way of taking a photograph.

So to me, Diane Arbus was so right to say that "Nobody is going to love your pictures like yourself."