Tag Archives: singapore

street photography saves me

If you follow me on Instagram, you know I’ve been on a street photography bender for months now. I mentioned last July that I’d started shooting after 4 months of no photography. That wasn’t true. I didn’t start again until September, which makes it 6 months—half a year—not using my camera. When I did finally…More

Homecoming

After 6 months of not shooting at all, what I’m mostly doing now, is taking pictures of light on surfaces. If that surface is a human, it makes for a better frame, but it doesn’t have to be. The creep of sunlight over texture is an everyday joy. I’ve spent half my life constantly moving…More

Neighbourhood

Singapore. Despite my best efforts, the pictures that insist on being made here, the motherland, are those that slip between the cacophony of nation building.More

One At A Time

Something is starting to twig. A word here, a sidelong look there. Cooked tar and smoking skin. It bites so badly that you are raw and limp, grateful. An introduction of colour. There. The Anthem of New BootsMore

Five

Singapore On the day I marked the fifth anniversary of this itinerant life, I went out for a long walk late at night and left my keys in the door. This being Singapore, and us living on a floor where no one save the neighbours goes to, nothing untoward happened. Only Mum coming home later…More

A Meditation on Transit

Singapore After seven weeks in New Zealand, Flemming and I returned to Singapore in early December, to the brand new Downtown Line on the MRT (metro) system. The best part? There’s a station right down the road from home. A five minute stroll from Mum’s front door, and I main-line it into the country’s urban…More

On the bus to KL

When I was growing up in Singapore, trips to Malaysia happened several times a year. Both my folks, being originally Malaysian, have family there, and my Dad also went game fishing in Malaysian waters all the time. It remains, for me, a place of myth and magic. Every supernatural tale I’ve heard originated there. These…More

On returning home

Singapore Home is so often the hardest place to return to. As I celebrate 4 years on the road, I’ve noted feeling something suspiciously akin to gladness at being in Singapore. This is unusual for me, given the isolation of coming back to empty spaces of friends and family who have left, sets in too…More

Radio silence

I’ve been blogging since 1999, when Blogspot was all the rage. Self publishing was a revelation, as was the ability to connect with people I would have otherwise never encountered. Once I started blogging, I couldn’t stop. Writing for the public, even if that public was three people, was my first taste of creative production, this thing we call…More

On resonance

The other day I found Red Bull’s Singapore Seven series – a set of interviews with local movers and shakers about how they got to where they are, and what it is that keeps them going. I went through all 7 of them, back to back. Rapt for once: a non-standard response to internet video, which is…More

The High Road

Singapore, December 2015 I haven’t lived in Singapore since 1999, but have spent a significant amount of time there in the last 3 years. It’s a topsy turvy process, confronting the strangeness of the superficially familiar. It’s easy for me to say “I’m Singaporean” everywhere, except in Singapore, because it’s there that the phrase makes…More