The Photo Thing

Collecting photos of Singapore, building a conversation about local identity

[thephotothingsg]

break/hiatus

We might officially be on hiatus, but continue collecting photograph entries and doing our pop-ups. Watch out for us at Doortodoor on 20 June! 

What is The Photo Thing? It is part the romance of collecting: hoarding, keeping nostalgia locked and yet free; part a place to discard memory, yet retain control over chaos, and part a holding-space for the discordant traces of our physical and mental being, across time.

[neonellipsis]

It occurs to me that what I have been collecting, through the photography project, are not just pictures of my country or portraits of practical objects, but a database that law does not know what to do with. It has no legal standing as a database, only as objects, but reading Marcus Boon again...

[thephotothingsg]

We're still accepting submissions, email [email protected] with photos of either 'the most practical object' or 'most important object' in your home. Click here for more details.

Come for the exhibition! Event link and registration details for the public programme are up here.

See more at thephotothingsg

[alittleyellowlion]

"Eight years without you, but you’re still my number one best friend."

Finally did my long overdue submission to thephotothing.

[thephotothingsg]

Thank you ayellowlion​! Proud to feature this!

See more at thephotothingsg

[thephotothingsg]

{Exhibition Narrative} Ruizhi: River and Hanuman

“Sail down the river which brings us life, winding through my Singapore…this is Home, truly, where I know I must be” Kit Chan sings in the wonderful song. Today the only people willing to sail down that river would be tourists, or curious locals wondering what an $8.00 boatride feels like. This must be home, truly: an acceptable shade of turquoise; wild and fecund nature, tamed and sanitized,

Cleaned Up, so so that it no longer reeks of any Odour.

In the hazy horizon, the few, lingering old gods who still remain look on, wait on. Hanuman, by the sea, marvels and yet laments the strange changes that have come to this strange land in the centuries since he was brought here. Once, they remembered Him, and made offerings. These days the supplications flow in a different direction, carried upstream by stronger tides, louder voices, brighter lights. By the cluttered, quiet seashore, Hanuman dreams too, about Home.

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Photo Credit (in order of appearance): Tan Kai Yun, Chu Hao Pei

[awwww-cute]

[omgtsn]

birb is grumby do not make a peep

[thephotothingsg]

Sometimes...the most important object in your home can really just be a grumpy bird. 

Send us a photo of the most important/practical thing in your home! Submissions are open until 3 March, that's in 10 days. 

Email [email protected]

See more at thephotothingsg

[thephotothingsg]

for some reason, this jives pretty well with what this project's about:

Sweet perfumes of incense Graceful rooms of alabaster stone All I ever wanted

This is my home With my father, mother, brother Oh so noble, oh so strong Now I am home Here among my trappings and belongings I belong

See more on this photo project at thephotothingsg

[bookporn]

Readers browsing through the damaged library of Holland House after the nazi blitzbombing in London, September 1940.

[thephotothingsg]

Marrying our love (some of us anyway) for books, death/decay/destruction, memorialising and the camera as purveyor of photographic evidence

[thephotothingsg]

Why focus on the majority?

How have we selected our photos? Why have we not focused on specific groups, or 'vulnerable groups'?

Take a typical conversation from our discussions:

A: Should we focus on migrant workers? Or kids with cancer? Or handicapped elderly?

B: I’m not comfortable with that, there’s something that feels wrong about it..

The callousness with which we can now rattle off a list of ‘vulnerable groups’ is discomfiting. It is possible because vulnerability, inclusiveness, social work, and social entrepreneurship, has in the past two years become an overwhelming focus in our national conversation (it’s also heavily supported by government funding).

Choosing to articulate the concerns of a ‘vulnerable population’, without naming them as such, is immensely difficult. Language restricts and handicaps us—when we give a name to something, someone or a group of someones, we categorize them. Language, as Kristeva and Lacan have pointed out, is tyrannical; it deforms our experience of Real lived existence. The question we pursue is: how may we keep groups always particular, non-universal, such that “politics proper always involves a kind of short-circuit between the Universal and the Particular” (Žižek, 2006, p. 69-70)?

According to Erik Swyngedouw, to create spaces for authentic politics—‘the art of the impossible’ (Žižek, 1999)—to happen, such a project must make it possible for the Particularistic to ‘speak without being spoken’, in a space already saturated by an excessive focus on ‘vulnerable groups’.

It should illuminate the collective humanity and not the divisions, but still retain the distinctions, the particularistic, while giving space to the Universal to emerge from this disorder.

And it should give freedom to people to make sense of the disorder.

There are solutions to such questions, but the difficulty prompts us to keep questioning and asking what better ways to deal simultaneously with our sameness and distinctiveness.

It also makes us wonder: Is there a name for such a process? Why must we write and think about this? Is this apparent or obvious to people?

What do you think?

[seasunb]

Hamsa Hand

[thephotothingsg]

Objects! Not from singapore, but we find these around often too. Like other amulets, the hand wards off evil spirits. Now I wonder which of these commodities has more magic in them! See more objects at thephotothingsg.

[thephotothingsg]

“Industrialsocieties turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.” - In Plato's Cave, On Photography

In On Photography, Susan Sontag seems to almost lambast photography—if nothing, she takes clear swipes at it. Here, we think through some of her notable quotes from the first chapter of the book, and assess their implications for this project.

Photographs, Susan Sontag says, are collectible objects. They “thicken the environment we recognize as modern” with frozen snapshots of moments, and in so doing also make the world collectible.

Because they are passive and ubiquitous, she says, they also possess a form of aggression. This goes beyond the voyeuristic aggression of capturing subjects in their intimate moments and private spaces. “To photograph someone is…to turn people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.” They become a symbol for something other than themselves. Photographs can therefore be dehumanizing.

But photography is also an “elegaic art, a twilight art”. It slices out select moments, and privileges moments that “one can keep and look at again”. These inevitably become parts of a history that one can lament, pine for, feel nostalgic for. Photographs drain the life from living beings and substitutes that with pathos. The original meaning of the photograph is easily lost.

Indeed, Sontag says, people are only affected by photographs when they are already politically aware. The photograph itself has no political merit to it; in fact, photographs desensitize people to their subjects—their ubiquity creates a wall of images scraped of emotional experience; a collectible reality. We don’t have to go far to find examples of this: poverty porn, food porn, travel porn, and the various obsessions that social media is expanding for us—‘keeping up with the Jones’s’ has evolved into keeping up with our friends’ lives on our Facebook feed, and the Internet has harnessed our compulsion to click.

But in the 40-odd years since Sontag wrote On Photography (1977), her assertion that “photographs thicken the environment we call modern” has perhaps overreached itself. Just as she criticizes the photograph for making “reality atomic, manageable, and opaque”, for denying “interconnectedness, continuity”, and conferring on each photographed moment the character of mystery, the world today has become more disconnected from reality; images give us the sense of proximity and intimacy but are really offer little more than phantasmagorical, superficial understandings of reality.

She offers perhaps her most damning words for photography when she says:

The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. It will be a knowledge at bargain prices—a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom….the omnipresence of photographs has an incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility. By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

So what hope is there for this project? What can it offer, if it is not to be as dastardly and disingenuous as Sontag claims photography is?

The world today has taken on the medium and message of photography to new lengths. We are more passive consumers and producers of the photograph than ever, and we judge, live, gossip, stereotype, categorise the world based on the images we see around us. So perhaps getting out of this cavern of digital images requires us to change the way we ask questions of, and respond to the photograph.

Sontag’s critique focuses on photographs as descriptors, but not parts of a process. Just as photographs atomise reality, photographic answers can sharpen our focus on aspects of reality, as most photojournalists would attest to (for example, see this news story). Photographs threaded together by careful, conscientious narratives can become forces that become our windows to the world, for the better. But her critique reminds us of the ease with which we may and do slip into mindless, indulgent consumption of the image.

How may we change the way we encounter the photograph?

See more at thephotothingsg

[thephotothingsg]

“I would describe Marxism as a philosophy of wonder: what appear before consciousness, as objects of perception, are not simply given, but are effects of history. ‘Even the objects of the simplest “sensuous certainty” are only given him through social development, industry, and commercial intercourse.’ To learn to see what is ordinary, what has the character of ‘sensuous certainty’, is to read the effects of this history of production as a form of ‘world making’.”

— Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 180.

[thephotothingsg]

Personal musings on 'Practicality' & 'Importance'

What is practical versus what is important – a discussion we had, seated cross-legged on the floor of a public library.

I thought and said that that I see a dichotomy between practicality and importance. The practical is external and (relatively) objective (but still varies from one cultural context and marker to another) whereas importance is an internal, subjective value we accord to things, places, people – and the visceral. When internal importances are validated, approved and even sanctioned by the external (people, society, systems), they take on the value of the practical (at least a little) and whether we realize or like it or not, we seek to translate the important to the practical. This is what sustains us.

However, in our daily lives, we wrestle to translate the practical to the important. We seek to internalize the ways of the world, its packaged security and comfort, its ditch-drain and clogged sewage-pipe of dreams (rather, ambitions). We pretend that the practical is important, but its importance is not accorded by the self (internally) but by other(s) (externally).

Few things are important to me, but even ‘practical’ – I don’t know. Pursuing a university education is practical. Working part-time is practical. Is there no respite from the practical? Is there no intersection between the practical and the important? In the pursuit of the practical, the things and ideals that were important have been blanched of meaning.

Tell me there have been lesser losses.

Practicality as the price and importance as the value.

Wilde is right, we know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

By Lisabelle

[thephotothingsg]

{Exhibition Narrative} Yishan: Couple and Cars

The old couple leaves; the cars come. Or the cars leave and the old couple comes. Standing in time is never the affair when a moment is all that lasts. Moving on……

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Photo Credits (in order of appearance): Jessie Leong, Johnathan Chen

[thephotothingsg]

{Exhibition Narrative} Jiayi: Tins and Flats

There seems to be a lot of talk about Singapore’s heritage being swept away by the sardine can-HDB flats, leaving behind a well-ordered but soulless city. Our idea of flat living appears to be that of drab gray prisons we trudge back to after a weary day spent in a cramped cubicle. Is the beauty and “Singaporeaness” of HDB living dependent solely on the “void deck lifestyle”, the small ‘mamak’ shops or old-school sweet shops that make the void deck their home, and the sight of elderly people chatting as their grandchildren laughed and ran about? Can we not see the life and individual character within the orderly arrangement of HDB flats?

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Photo Credits (in order of appearance): Chu Hao Pei, Shawn Quek

[thephotothingsg]

{Exhibition Narrative} Ruizhi: Skyscrapers and Letterboxes

Metal: These are the towering odes to Development and Progress: the modern, man-made mountains raised for “the happiness, prosperity, and progress of our nation”. Through the deep valleys made by these leviathans the lesser mortals navigate, little ants questing to build these great steel citadels even higher and taller.

Metal: shaped and ordered, neat and regular. Each letterbox a bubble, a secret life stashed behind a little lock. The petulant, persistent clang of letters being slotted into these mailboxes expertly by the mailman filled my curious childhood afternoons. The iron smell of ink on the flyers that were crammed tight into these tiny cells, the delicious, dark anticipation of a letter from a friend. Internet, and email, was just a distant, alien, jagged connecting tone back then. Those great steel mountains were still a fiction to me back then.

See more at thephotothingsg

Photo Credits (in order of appearance): Lee Yu Teng, Yilina Leong

[thephotothingsg]

The Method

This is what we did previously.

1. We collect up to 5 photos from each of you.

Theme: Something in Singapore, or of Singapore, that draws your attention, that you like, find interesting, or inspires you, or that you think is unique to Singapore

These may be in any one of the following categories: Places, (Figures of) People, Objects, Body Parts. Strictly no mixing of categories. One category per photo.

To each photo, we will invite you to append EITHER a plain description of the photograph (where, when, whom, how etc.) OR a caption that may be humorous, witty, punny, activist, critical, nostalgic, dreamy…you get the point.

Note: Derogatory, offensive and explicit content will not be published. Publication of submitted material lies at the discretion of the project's curators.

2. We publish them on this page, together with an ID number, your name, and the accompanying description or caption.

3. We print a selection of the photos (all if sufficient funding is available). Photos will be accompanied by their corresponding ID number. Each printed photograph will be cut into a single jigsaw piece.

4. We exhibit them in an interactive exhibition which invites the public to explore your photographs and create three-dimensional structures with them, and then to snap a picture of these structures and add an accompanying caption to them. THIS is the heart of the project, and we want to see what comes out of it!