just rambling

How Will We Picture Our Past?

After doing some work recently involving the use of images of Singapore’s past, I’ve learnt that there are only three sources for old images: PICAS, Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) and personal collections.

PICAS is the Picture Archives Singapore Database run by the National Archives of Singapore (NAS) that contains some of the oldest photographs of Singapore. To buy a photo from the database is just as archaic. You cannot buy a photo online. Instead, you fill up a form and place your order at NAS itself, and return to collect the actual print. The only plus point is that you pay much less for a photo from PICAS, as compared to SPH, if you’re publishing for educational and cultural purposes.

While PICAS may have the oldest photographs, SPH has the most extensive collection of images of Singapore’s past. In fact, many images in the PICAS database actually belong to SPH. This means you have to deal with SPH and pay their rates if you want to use the SPH photos. Their extensive database is no surprise as SPH is a news organisation that covers all the important events of our nation’s lifetime. While it has an online SPH Photobank System, that database only carries current photos. To see all the old photos SPH has, you have to make an appointment to go down to their Information Resource Centre to search their internal servers.

The final resource for old images of Singapore is an emerging one thanks to the proliferation of digital imaging tools. People can now easily put up their personal collection of photographs and there are many gems out there waiting to be discovered. The National Library Board (NLB) is making an effort to canvass these photos and make them available via it’s Singapore National Album of Pictures (SNAP) website. It has also created a Flickr! set too. The only issue is with regards to their use. I have no idea if I can somehow obtain these photos for publishing. Another collection that exists online is Memories of Singapore, which is made up largely of photo collections from expatriates. Interestingly, the photos also give a glimpse of an expatriates’ life in Singapore in the past.

The problem with the current offerings of image databases is their poor quality and how there are so few of them. This limits the view of our colourful and diverse past, such that after a while, the same few ‘classic’ photos are reused to depict Singapore’s history. While SPH has built up the most extensive database, public access to it is troublesome, and the cost of use is prohibitive. PICAS is disappointing, and it could do so much better in terms of collection and the simple task of enabling online payment. I’m also a little puzzled as to why I wonder NLB is spearheading SNAP instead of NAS.

More importantly, I think there are a lack of image databases in Singapore and we’re depending too much on a few big institutions to document our lives. Especially nowadays, when there are so many event photographers and amateur photographers covering public life in Singapore. What is lacking are organisations and people who can amass these photographs, make sense of them, and make them available online so that future generations, and even you and I, can better remember what life is like today.

In Singapore, Emptiness is Full of Meaning

An empty piece of land is not something that will catch our eye as we go about our daily lives, but for photographer Darren Soh, it sparked his on-going project that documents the building of Marina Bay Sands. Presenting at the inaugural PLATFORM, Darren showed a full-house crowd at Sinema his “progress pictures” of the integrated resort since construction began some four years ago. The photographer, who has made several photo collections of the Singapore landscape, said this island is one big construction site and that makes emptiness in Singapore’s landscape significant and something worth documenting.

Indeed, living in a country where everything is so transient, Singapore’s landscape has been extensively photographed. However, most works on it that I’ve seen focuses on the death of landscapes and its decay. It’s become a knee-jerk reaction for photographers living here — just look at the number of photographers who have been flocking down to Tanjong Pagar Railway Station now that it’s future is in limbo. Darren’s project responds to this Singapore condition from a different time frame — its beginning and birth. More importantly, his project freezes the never-ending construction work that we are seemingly surrounded with and allows us to reflect, and even marvel, the building of Singapore.

Coincidentally, I recently had the privilege of helping do some background research for an architectural project that looks at the conditions of emptiness in Singapore. The findings of architect Thomas Kong’s project will be presented in ‘Zero’: Alternative Scenarios for Architecture in a Post-Bubble Era on 16 June in Rotterdam.

As a number, zero is neither negative nor positive but we often assign a degree of negativity despite its neutral meaning. A vacated site similarly lies in a liminal state with potentiality. However, architects have been taught that the only thing they could present to society is a building, to fill the void again. But what can they learn from the way in which individuals and groups appropriate empty sites in towns and cities? And in broader perspective, what can zero offer as we live through the Great Recession, when the myth of continuous economic growth is shattered, the assumption of ready capital for development can no longer be guaranteed and architecture students are taught only one mode of survival as a professional?

The reality of The Straits Times

Straits Times put on trial its latest “feature” today — seeing the world through tinted lenses (aka 3D glasses).

The paper says this is one way it is trying to improve itself, by allowing its readers to get the news from a different perspective. So I decided to do a simple quantitative analysis to find out if it was so. It turned out that only 10 out of the 65 news photo and graphics (excluding small profile pictures) could be seen in 3D perspective. On the other hand, some 20 advertisements were 3D ready. Plus, that pair of 3D spectacles was “Brought to You by Samsung”. And, if you didn’t know, TODAY newspaper was actually the first to bring 3D to newspapers. They worked with Panasonic Singapore and were upfront about it.

Most importantly, they kept it out of editorial content.

This aggressive campaign by Samsung and Panasonic to reinvent advertising on our local newspapers to push the 3D agenda is one thing. But, 3D editorial content? I’m not sure if it works, at all.

Besides the fact that it takes 1.5 hours for the photo desk to process a 3D photo, and photographers having to shoot such that it is suitable for 3D, the effect is simply not very nice at all. Through those glasses, the photos lose their colour. Without them, the photo looks blur. Moreover, none of the photos I saw today convinced me that seeing something pop out was nothing more than gimmicky. And, let’s not even start on how those spectacles hinders the reading experience!

If ST is really keen on improving their readers’ needs for images in the newspaper, then put it in multimedia journalism like this, and give more space to infographics and photojournalism in the newspaper and online. No need for anything fanciful, just let the talented photographers and artists do good old visual storytelling.

The only reason why I think ST hopped on to 3D was because it is ‘cool’ now to have it, and I won’t be surprised if it was heavily subsidised by the advertisers in some way or another.

Do photographers ‘make’ or ‘take’?

I’ve been talking to some photographers recently and there is a recurring word they use to describe what they do…

“I make photographs.”

I’ve always thought of photographers as people who take photographs. So is there really a difference between the two?

To make, I think, highlights the photographer’s involvement in the photo. That the act of snapping is deliberate and possibly, even ‘manipulated’ (not photoshopped), to create a desired image. This is opposed to take, which almost sounds objective and mechanical — think of this as photographing what you see, as it is.

In case you’re wondering, these photographers were all doing social documentary work, which means they see their pictures as a reflection of reality.

So why make instead of take? I think it inserts a purpose (some say agenda) into the photographs, which without it, might make photos seem nothing more than events coverage. If it’s the latter I want, I probably just need to place a camera at strategic times and locations and let it snap all day.

To make a photograph, means the photographer matters too, that it is he/she telling the story through a photo and not just the camera.

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If you’re keen on social documentary and visual story-telling in Singapore, do check out this new PLATFORM.

Advocating Journalism, Advocacy Journalism

After embarking on the interesting option of publishing my final-year journalism project online last year, it was heartening to see the junior batch take their projects online too. While I love my printed newspaper, there is no doubt that the future of journalism must go online in some way. On a personal level, it’s also an excellent platform to ensure your project doesn’t get forgotten in the archives, but remains out there to be Googled on as and when the topic becomes relevant.

Kababayan: Faces of Filipinas in Singapore is a photojournalism project by Kong Yen Lin and Nura Ling that puts a new face to the Filipino women migrant community in Singapore. Long regarded as just here to work as domestic maids, Filipinas who come to Singapore today increasingly span different classes and occupations including designers, businesswomen, nurses and teachers. It is an impressive depth of work that uses multimedia slideshows and photo essays to bring you through the life of some 16 Filipinas living and working in Singapore. It would have been even more impressive with better editing though, especially in the multimedia slideshows. There’s just a bit too much going on to keep me watching till the end.

Food Waste Republic is an investigative journalism piece that looks at food wastage in Singapore through feature stories, multimedia slideshows and quotes from experts. Readers are also encouraged to interact with the project by submiting photos to the “Food Waste Police”. The team of Estelle Low, Miak Aw and Chen Wei Li have really put in a lot of effort, even going through people’s rubbish to document the extent of the problem. While surfing the website, one thing that kept going off in my mind was, where does journalism end and advocacy start? I wondered if this project is a campaign to reduce food wastage rather than a journalism piece, especially with snazzy look of the website and the attempt to ‘police’ food wastage. But then, is there a difference between the two? Shouldn’t all journalists care a lot about the topic they write for?

On this note about caring and journalism I like to point to an encouraging initiative going in my alma mater: Photojournalism@NTU. I’m not sure if it’ll become an annual event, but photojournalism students this year got a chance to showcase their works and meet fellow photojournalists and editors in the industry in this networking session. I saw a lot of great work out there — all photo essays about Singapore. The current instructor, Tay Kay Chin, has promised to continue pushing these young photojournalists to point their lenses at what’s going on here instead of exotic foreign lands. I really agree that there are too many stories untold here.

And after seeing all the work of these young journalists, I wondered why is it that our local newspapers remain so staid? Whether it is in terms of topics, or the medium, one finds it hard to consistently detect the vigour as seen in these students’ works. There is good news, especially for photojournalists. When asked about photojournalism’s place in The Straits Times during the session, its photo editor said that a micro-site was coming up soon on ST’s website that will showcase multimedia slideshows and photo essays from their photojournalists. They may accept works from the public too.

Other than that, I’m not confident anything else is really going to change. For one, the people right up there making decisions have been there for years (Sumiko Tan wrote about her jubilee at the organisation in today’s Sunday Times, and she’s not the only one, nor the longest). And, without competition here, hardly anything changes as my research on ST’s newspaper redesign has shown.

For me, the saddest part about all this is not that I may never get to read a great Singaporean newspaper. But, I may never see these young journalists’ byline beyond their final-year projects because they gave up chasing stories for a paper that will never showcase them in a manner that they truly deserve.