Hello! I’m Charlene, one third of the Parallax Photo Journal editorial team. For a long time, I’d tell people I’d been a photographer for “about a decade.” I started saying this at around the 8 year mark, and I’m still saying it now… on year 15. Might be time to update the ol’ barbeque statement.
I picked up photography in my late 20s, and have no formal qualifications in the practice. I learned it the way a lot of people do — the internet, plenty of blundering, and other photographers, who continue to be critical to my continuing education about the varied facets of this practice: perspective, business, tech, and so on.
I got my start in professional photography shooting weddings in Australia, which was a great primer for later client work — almost all of it event related — in Europe and North America. I’ve since had the massive privilege of photographing and connecting with people and places all over the world.
In 2019, I moved to Iraq to take a job with a small American aid organisation based in Kurdistan, the autonomous northern part of the country, working with refugees and internally displaced people. My primary job was photography, writing and video. How well the photographs, words and films did their job — raising donations, bringing people together for the organisation’s programming — was how well I navigated the course of what I was doing there, who I worked for, and where I stood in all of it.
This was the work that put demands on my university-trained sensitivity to culture, ethnicity, gender, and intersecting histories and geographies, every single day. It was confronting my own assumptions, blind spots, privilege, consequent complicity, and being accountable for my judgements. It was learning to do better: at seeing, at thinking, at doing. Better at human-ing.
It was enriching, transformative work, which continues today… long after the job ended.
COVID-19 cut my time in Iraq short. A year after I landed in Kurdistan, I found myself returning to Singapore, where I was born, raised, and called home until the age of 18. Where I’m presently writing this.
Regardless of what jobs I’ve done, photography has — and continues to — change my life.
Were it not for a camera in my hand, I’d likely have lived a far more insular life over the past decade. Photography gives me a reason to say “yes,” “why not,” and pretty frequently “I don’t know anything about that, soooo… let’s go!” to people and places. Photography is the reason I’m here now, launching Parallax Photo Journal with my colleagues.
Charlene Winfred is a photographer, media producer, writer, editor, humanitarian and a raft of other things in-between / around. Born and bred in Singapore, she has spent over two decades working and travelling as a photographer in Australia, Europe and North America. Prior to returning to Singapore in 2020, Charlene worked with refugees and internally displaced people in northern Iraq for a US aid organisation. She is passionate about community, and in her work as a producer and editor, has championed important social issues, supporting practitioners in the field to tell stories of those most in need, as well as those making an impact. Much to the chagrin of cat people like Tom and Matt, she really likes dogs.
