Been busy with the big show at National Library. 24 photographers, in one location. 160 plus images. Was quite a feat trying to put together medium-large (mostly) sized works in the spaces made available. So was quite happy that I was all ready since Tues. 3 days before the appointed date to set up. *pat on me back* But there were other stuffs that came cropping up just last night, but still, it was manageable!
Do come for the show!
.. I wish I had time to just waste.
it’s the second time running, and this time round, things are just moving and flowing along.
yes, of course I’m talking about circa; my photo outreach program for people 13 to 19 years old. I’m calling it circa2. duh.
all help welcome! there’s a lot of sai kang, but well come along if you have a fair bit of time, passionate about helping the photography industry as a whole, want to be a part of this one-of-its-kind photo program, etc. Go to www.circa.com.sg to know more. Especially after 1st March, it’ll be clearer. (Of course, it gets better as it ages.)
happy.
the smell, the sounds, the touch, all the senses.
it’s never the same with mind over matter. it’ll come a time where you realize it’s a memory. Imagine if I could be at a place where I could just sit and only hear the wind, the rustle of the grass, and creaking of the branches, the movement of the pure raw energy from me to nature and nature to me.
when was the last time you heard nothing but natural sounds?
when was the last time you feel real fresh from just breathing?
when was the last time you hug a tree, felt the veins on the wing of a butterfly?
when was the last time you could see a real yellowish pinkish egg shell color?
or where?
It’s strange how one moment I’d volunteer to give my guppies away, and when they are all gone, I sudden feel the loss of the fishies.
Maybe it’s the memories that came with the fish, or the memories shared with the fish. I remember the very moment when I started with a big earthen pot full of fish and plants to the double glass aquariums, to the single green filled aquarium. So much has happened to me and it seems they had gone through as much of the changes with me.
Maybe it’s just another chapter of my life unfolding before me.
tears swelling
falling
dripping
soaking. i miss you.
本質 kinda means original quality in English, but it doesn’t truly translate well in English. Much like a lot of the chinese words I’m so used to that I don’t bat an eyelid using it. Some times, I wish I could type in Chinese so some of these entries can be in Mandarin, maybe one day I’ll master that.
Was just thinking of what is this 本質 of Singapore, and what has changed? We always talk about keeping the spirit of the place alive, yet update it. Kinda like giving plastic surgery to a person and keeping the person’s spirit the same, but looking younger. Few realize that the person changes with the surgery.
But the original quality of the place is more than just a spirit, it much more than just a brick or color. It’s the smell, it’s the flow of activities that affects the flow of life, it’s the colors of that era, it’s the textures on the walls. More importantly, it’s how all of these many little things keeps the kind of people that will live there, for a long time.
I think we’ve lost that 本質 of much of Singapore. The orbit (read: out of fashion) colors are no more; replaced by even more orbit colors. The quality of life is no more. The creative energy is no more. The questioning population is no more.
I remember the drains that I could catch fish from, the spiders I could pair to fight each other, the really nice prostitutes that I met when I roamed the road just outside my nanny’s home, the old wooden houses that were neighbors, the smell of the old wooden houses, the feel of really old things, where dirt is from the earth and not cement, to have a pet snake, to go under the house that was on concrete stilts, to walk down Orchard Road and not feel as if every step I take is replaced by the very next person behind me, to have everyone finish work at 5.30, and be squeezing on the buses to get home, there is so much I remember. Remembering = no longer there.
Bored.
Maybe that’s why I do photography / painting / art, to create that part of me that I can remember.
When something is so well made, and it’s online, I wished I had a faster connection, a better computer, oh heck, I want a dedicated system just to view through this. Like Wow.
How is it that for weeks you left me so hot and dry, and actually starting to enjoy it. And how is it that quite suddenly today, you abandoned your thick dark load of water and I instantly love it.
I’m going out to stand in the rain naked.
I missed you, rain.
This has to be my latest fav. What a wonderful use of organic and space, yet modern and futuristic at the same time. like. wow.
Something a friend of mine wrote for an exhibition for circa2007. I’d almost forgotten about it until I was looking and flipping through all the paperwork done and it came up again. Thought I should share this.
What makes a picture of Singapore beautiful, or at least interesting to look at?
Living and working in a city-state saturated with photographs through the mass media, all of us are exposed on a daily basis to images designed to sell products, or see in a prescribed way. We often have to look elsewhere for newer, richer ways of seeing.
Why choose youth between the ages of 13-19 for this photo exhibit? The reason is simple: youth today carry within themselves forms of raw self-expression, in a country that is only as diverse and interesting as we choose to make it. They may see things in a way that others born just a few years earlier do not. But at the same time, talent needs to be nurtured where it can be found, so that newer, more experimental ways of seeing and appreciating photographs can be shared with a wider audience. And few have realized the impact of a generation that mainly started with digital capture instead of the traditional roll of film. How will the images BE different? Ignoring these things may mean that our society will miss out on valuable ways of experiencing and understanding a world that is rapidly changing around us.
A beautiful picture is often unexpected; a raw, sincere vision of something strange yet familiar at the same time. The mamak shop man under a void deck; kids in a playground where there is no longer any sand. Foreign domestic workers who appear more loving towards children than their exhausted biological mothers. The hardworking hawker, trying not to smile, camera-shy; a pensive religious leader whose inner self is as impenetrable as the god he communicates with. Fishing on the manufactured coast of a man-made island where almost all of our food is imported everyday. Why do such things continue to happen here? Will it change? What will the continuing influx of foreign talent change in the way we react to the world outside of Singapore?
Some pictures need a second look for their multi-layered stories to sink in, such as those depicting western-style marriage rituals that we now take for granted as being part and parcel of the Singapore social landscape, instead of being seen as a leftover colonial legacy. In another photo, a massive Valentine’s Day card (another cultural import, like Christmas?) is offered from girl to boy without eye-contact; cutesy, awkward yet painfully, personally sincere at the same time. These can make for great, strange, simple but infuriatingly complex pictures.
Some images have intangible impressions that translate from sight into other senses. Shades of green: the muted, sun-kissed cascades of tree leaves overshadowing the obscene plastic kitsch of synthetic dustbins scattered everywhere: the latter a form of visual litter themselves? Within the intimate settings of school corridors, the deep green of a prefect’s jacket echoes the rough fabric of musky army cadet uniforms. The fuzzy texture of a vacant golf-green corkboard at the back of a modern classroom where ancient Shakespearian literature is still being taught in school.
Elsewhere, thick, fat tears from a grey sky slide down windows, echoing a numbing melancholy that everyone who has ever ridden a cold rain-battered bus home has felt at some point in their lives. In contrast, another image points to a seemingly endless number of days where golden streaks of sunlight caress the figures of children on their way home from school, walking in a secret garden that no one else knows, if only for the moment that the picture was taken.
The labelling of one’s name on the sides of textbooks; liquid paper marks in the shape of a white-washed heart, on jotter book covers: inscriptions that say not only “This is mine”, but also “I was here”. These are almost invisible, yet widespread forms of student graffiti that can’t be sold for the tourist dollar in this commercialized country. A complement and contrast to school-approved inscriptions of mathematical formulae in these very same jotter books.
Crowds. Halls of religious worshippers, armies of shoppers, bus-loads of commuters making their way to work, youths in push-up position in front of a superior officer. Marks of a well-organized, disciplined society. Are we being forced into these situations, do we do these things by choice, or is it often mixture of both?
In pictures, street signs and walls start to have double meanings. The well-known stick-figures of a man, a woman, 10 cents: a simple toilet sign? Or a playful suggestion that petty money is part of every social relationship here, even love (and how would this sit alongside the above-mentioned Valentine’s Day card/marriage pictures in another setting)? In another photo, the irony of the poster-scarred wall on which ‘no posters allowed’ has become part of a texture and a wound in social memory as well. Elsewhere, a familiar sign telling us to ‘value life, act responsibly’, as if each and every one of us is on the verge of mass hysteria and suicide.
Connections form between individuals within pictures, between pictures, between viewers. What thoughts and feelings can be shared through pictures? And what kind of thoughts can’t?
Diane Arbus once said that ‘a photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.’ Winogrand’s famous one: “There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. I photograph to see what something will look like photographed.”
By their very nature, photographs often hold diverse meanings for different viewers, in a manner very different from the written word. How we view a photograph often says more about the viewer than the picture itself.
The Singapore story is still being written, beginning with the youngest amongst us today. Their photographs are here to be seen, waiting for the chance to begin a dialogue with whoever is ready to listen.
Geoffrey Pakiam