25 years of Singapore photography
Singapore International Photography Festival looks back at how the nation has looked at itself through the camera lens
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[SINGAPORE] Singapore changes so quickly that photographs taken only a generation ago already feel, well, archival.
In one of Tan Pin Pin’s black-and-white images from 1992, a young woman in sunglasses pushes through the cheerful crush of a school funfair, one hand sweeping back her hair.
In another, a woman in Orchard Road shields herself from the sun with a checked handkerchief.
Nothing momentous is happening, which is precisely what makes the pictures by Tan – who is now an acclaimed documentary filmmaker – so absorbing.
These are ordinary Singaporeans caught before the age of smartphones, social media and the compulsive documentation of everyday life.
They form part of 63 images from some 2,800 black-and-white negatives which Tan made as a 22-year-old returning to Singapore after time abroad, roaming the city to photograph everything from funerals to weddings.
Her exhibition is just one of the highlights of the 10th Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF), which runs from Oct 16 to either November 2026 or January 2027.
The photographers’ fascination in how unfamiliar the familiar has become runs through this year’s festival, aptly themed “In my end is my beginning”.
The festival centrepiece, Shifting Images: Photography from Singapore (2000-2025), is an ambitious survey of 25 years of local photography featuring 47 artists across seven exhibitions at various spaces.
The spaces include ShanghArt Gallery, Mizuma Gallery, Figment, SingPost Geylang Post Office, Guoco Midtown, Geylang East Library and Stories Joo Chiat, a Hotel By Cove.
Rather than offering a dutiful chronology, Shifting Images looks at how Singapore photographers have used the medium to grapple with technology, archives, identity, memory, gender and an endlessly mutating city.
For instance, George Wong’s 2015 photo Fall in, Fall in looks affectionately at an era when every Housing & Development Board (HDB) household was given a Singapore flag to hang on their parapet during National Day.
Ong Chan Hao’s Sorry for the Inconvenience turns the city’s endless pursuit of redevelopment into a semi-abstract image blending a faint image of the construction site with the completed building, while Stephanie Lee’s exuberant image of an older couple showered in confetti makes private family history feel almost cinematic.
For SIPF co-founder and artistic director Gwen Lee, the 10th anniversary is less about taking a victory lap than asking what photography does next. “Every photograph is both an arrival and a departure,” she says, adding that photography keeps “acquiring new meanings with every encounter”.
The festival’s gaze also travels beyond Singapore: Its international Open Call Portfolio Showcase presents 20 projects from 16 countries.
Meanwhile, 41 shortlisted photobooks were selected from 188 applications spanning more than 37 countries. They include an intriguing project by young photographer Hidhir Badaruddin who reimagines national service through the lens of non-heterosexual men. Hidhir was the first Singaporean to win a Getty Images grant in 2021.
There are portfolio reviews, talks and masterclasses too – including a particularly timely keynote by artist Boris Eldagsen on photography versus artificial intelligence-generated “promptography”.
But the most compelling reason to visit may be simpler: to look at Singapore looking at itself over the past 25 years.
Visit sipf.sg for more information.
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