Southeast Asia is a vast and diverse region of the world, with a population approaching 700 million, encompassing an overlapping range of cultures and peoples, and a complex and entangled history. Taking ASEAN as a geographical boundary, Southeast Asia consists of Brunei, Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.The fragmented and overlapping social and political makeup of the region belies the homogeneity with which it could be superficially regarded.
The same could be said of photography in and of Southeast Asia. This does not mean, however, that we cannot explore the idea of such a confluence of approaches to photography from a specifically Southeast Asian perspective. As writer and artist Zhuang Wubin noted in the introduction to his book “Southeast Asian Photography: A Survey” published in 2016, the process of creating a canon of Southeast Asian Photography is long overdue, while in Europe and America, institutions and museums have been steering such a canonisation for at least a century.
In 2022, the National Gallery Singapore opened an exhibition titled “Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia”, which draws extensively on Singapore’s National Archives as well as regional individual and institutional collections, and is perhaps one of the first major institutional attempts at tackling such a canonisation of photography in relation to the region. Or, as curator Charmaine Toh states in the catalogue’s introductory essay; to offer “an additional strand in the tapestry that is the global history of photography.”
That such surveys as those by Wubin and the curators of “Living Pictures” are only emerging in recent years, reveals that in the global story of the photographic medium, Southeast Asia is still somewhat of an unknown quantity. While individual practitioners may be represented in the global canon, the geographical concept of a Southeast Asian Photography remains elusive. It is quite telling that one of the most important platforms for Asian Photography of the past decade is Kevin WY Lee’s somewhat appropriately named “Invisible Photographer Asia”.
Of course, one could regard such attempts at canonisation and categorisation as a fiction. After all, what do the quintessentially American photographs of Walker Evans have in common with Nan Golding, stylistically speaking? Are they both examples of an American Vernacular? In Europe, is Chris Killip’s documentation of a seam of culture across Northern England the same as Luigi Ghirri’s observations of place, class and culture across Italy? Are any of these that different from the photography practised in other parts of the globe? Well, yes, and no, is the unsatisfactory attempt at a reductive answer. What of the global influence of Salon Photography, practised across different regions, or the much imitated and rarely understood aesthetic of protest photography of 1950s and 1960s Japan, culminating in its artistic absorption via the short lived magazine “Provoke”? Where do these fit into a regional photographic vernacular – whether European, American, African or Asian? The truth of such matters is, as always, “a bit complicated”. Indeed, within contemporary Southeast Asian visual culture we can see both an internationalism with affinities that gravitate to centres outside the region, and a close association with regional social, political and cultural concerns. Nothing is quite as historically and culturally linear as it seems.
Nevertheless, this is where we find ourselves. The notion of place – both literally and figuratively – is one that grounds the photographic image. The question, often, is one of where you stand.
Tom White has spent the last twenty years working in the fields of art, media and academia. He is a visual communications educator, as well as a photographer in the journalism, editorial, advocacy and commercial spaces. He designed and delivered the Photojournalism & Documentary curriculum for Yale-NUS College in Singapore, and has also taught at the International Center of Photography and Columbia University in New York, in addition to instructing and facilitating various workshops and community-based social programs. Tom’s current research includes a focus on the potential of immersive and interactive documentary methods, and the continued importance of visual and media literacy. He’s been based in Singapore since 2011.
