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Surveying South-east Asia’s photography

SINGAPORE — When artist-researcher Zhuang Wubin started writing about photography in the region over a decade ago, there was no way of knowing that it would eventually snowball into the recently published 522-page volume, Photography in Southeast Asia: A Survey.

SINGAPORE — When artist-researcher Zhuang Wubin started writing about photography in the region over a decade ago, there was no way of knowing that it would eventually snowball into the recently published 522-page volume, Photography in Southeast Asia: A Survey.

The book describes the history of photography in South-east Asia from various points of view.

As the 38-year-old puts it: “I wasn’t ‘doing research’ in the sense that I didn’t have a research question to answer — I was not trying to find something. I didn’t have a hypothesis at that point in time; I was just collecting interviews whenever I travelled.”

This organic, curiosity-driven spirit pervades the survey as a whole, with Zhuang’s prose having both professional clarity and a conversational familiarity. There is a sense, in his use of language, of a practitioner in dialogue with his peers, rather than an academic observing subjects at a distance.

Zhuang’s itinerant curiosity also comes to the fore in the structure and content of his chapters: Rather than forcing the stories of each nation into standardised moulds, each chapter is tailored to the specific situations of the countries discussed — with Zhuang also noting the problems raised by the notion of neatly dividing something as international as photography along geographical boundaries.

Although the title might seem to suggest a sense of breadth, it is worth noting that it is not a definitive survey. “We should read any kind of survey with scepticism, or at least a healthy pinch of salt,” observed Zhuang, who takes pains to stress that there is still much work to be done in understanding the photography of the region. For all its heft, 522 pages averages out at fifty-odd for each of the 10 countries in Asean, with well over a century of photography’s history to cover.

Add to that geographical and temporal span the sheer breadth of photography itself, and the scale of things gets even more dizzying. Immersed as we are in our media-rich culture, we may not often stop to think about how photography may “appear in multiple forms; in documentary photography, in journalism, or as a personal practice. It can also become art and contemporary art photography, or be used by performance artists and sculptors as documentation”.

The book’s purpose, then, is not to accomplish the insurmountable task of serving as a definitive guide to the history of all the practices and perspectives of photography, and how photography and the region have shaped each other, but to offer a brief introduction to the same.

Although not discussed at great length in the book, one pressing question does receive mention in an afterword on future directions in photographic research — whither new and social media?

Zhuang groups these phenomena under a broader umbrella of what he calls digitisation, which extends also to the ubiquitisation of digital cameras. Rather than some disruptive aberration, Zhuang regards this process as the long-overdue fulfilment of photography’s egalitarian potential: A promise of democratisation dating back to the French government’s gift of the Daguerrotype process in 1839, “free to the world”. BRUCE QUEK

Photography in Southeast Asia: A Survey (S$48) is available for sale at Objectifs, Kinokuniya and the NUS Press website.

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