V. Photography as a Collaborative Practice in Southeast Asia

Tales of togetherness abound in accounts of photography in Southeast Asia. And stories of collaborative authorship figure prominently in the exhibition Living Pictures:Photography in Southeast Asia. Sharing these stories contributes to the process of “abandoning the notion that photographic history is best seen as the explosion of a Western technology whose practice has been molded by singular individuals,” as Christopher Pinney characterises the dominant historical narrative for photography in the West.¹ Collaborative authorship can take many forms: it may comprise people working directly with photographers, such as models or assistants, as well as collectors, donors, communities and friends. An emphasis on cooperative creation also brings into view people—including monks, women and civilians in military conflicts—who may otherwise have been sidelined or overlooked in histories of photography. Many stories of collaborative photographic authorship long predate Southeast Asia’s contemporary art collectives currently enjoying international prominence, in part due to their appearance at the documenta 15 exhibition in 2022.²

An early example is found in the photographic practices of Buddhist monks in Luang Prabang. Since the early 20^th century, monk-photographers and monk-collectors have worked collaboratively in the making of pedagogical and spiritual meanings for their images, which consist mainly of photo portraits of other monks, known collectively as the sangha. Another, quite different, instance of cooperative creation is the entanglement of photography in middle-class life for Wu Si Jing (b. 1934) in 1950s Singapore. As well as being one of very few women to professionally exhibit her photography during this period, Wu served as a model for her photographer husband, and as a writer later recorded these and other experiences which—like most of the major events in her life—had been captured on camera (see pls. 139 to 160). And in Saigon in the 21st century, yet another kind of collaboration arises in the work of the artist Dinh Q. Le (b. 1968), who for Crossing the Farther Shore repurposed thousands of found photographs of unknown families, taken in Saigon in the years before 1975 then abandoned, only to be later salvaged by Dinh from markets around the city.

Despite their disparate forms and contexts, these case studies share a common approach to photography as being a collaborative practice. These are collaborations of quite different kinds: Wu’s arises from a purely personal relationship, while Le’s from a history that is both personal and collective, whereas the Buddhist monks in Luang Prabang live and work communally in many aspects of monastic life. Before discussing these examples of cooperative authorship in more detail, I will first briefly consider the sociality of photography. It is of course from sociable forms of togetherness that collaborations arise, and it is in part because of communal approaches to and understandings of the medium that photography has become so embedded within Southeast Asian societies.

PHOTOGRAPHY IS SOCIAL

For the past 180 years, viewing photography has very often been a sociable activity: a pleasure best enjoyed together with others. As early as 1841, when the writer Munshi Abdullah (1797–1854) first saw the daguerreotype which he went on to describe in such famously clearsighted terms in his Hikayat Abdullah, he was joined by no fewer than three fellow witnesses. He was careful to record that “we saw a picture of the town of Singapore imprinted on [the plate], without deviation even by so much as the breadth of a hair.” ³ While many scholars and curators have emphasised the impressive technical precision of Abdullah’s account and his rapturous attention to the medium’s verisimilitude, the Munshi’s assiduousness in noting that his experience was shared with others has been largely overlooked.⁴ Yet this detail reveals the social nature of his first encounter with photography. As Elizabeth Edwards argues, photographs are “real visual objects engaged with in social space and real time.”⁵ Since Abdullah’s time, looking at photographic images has often been a communal experience, and our understandings of pictures are often textured by that social circumstance. Photography can be therefore understood not as an imported Western technology, but rather as enfolded within Southeast Asian societies. As the scholar and collector Peter Lee reminds us, the emergence of the medium was “a global, virtually simultaneous phenomenon with the same kind of impact and issues that new technologies might have in any society around the world;” moreover, “everywhere it first appeared, [photography] was equally novel.”⁶

Making photographs is also very often a social act. In the 19^th century, because of the cumbersome nature of the photographic process—as observed by Munshi Abdullah—many photographers hired assistants. This may have hastened the transfer of knowledge to Southeast Asians, who were often hired as assistants by European and other foreign photographers.⁷ Some of the world’s first photography books, made by Anna Atkins in the 1850s, were made in collaboration with her close friend and “almost sister” Anne Dixon.⁸ Atkins and Dixon’s delicate botanical cyanotypes included depictions of plants commonly found in Southeast Asia, such as the asplenium or “bird’s-nest fern”.⁹ Dating to 1853, these cyanotypes are likely the first photographic representations of Southeast Asian subjects made by women, and the first to be published in book form, produced by two friends working sociably together.¹⁰ During the 20^th century, with advances in technology and the resulting boom in amateur photography, taking pictures became a leisurely pastime very often shared among friends. Recalling the early 1950s in Singapore, Wu Si Jing writes that “in those days, young people loved having their photos taken in the countryside, and liked joining group tours for such outings.” She goes on to describe the sociable photography business undertaken by her husband Huang Da Li (1925–2006) and his brother, catering to those “young people” and their “group tours.”¹¹

Just as viewing and making photographs are often activities that bring people together, pictures themselves also tend to congregate. Photographs amass in albums and archives; they appear alongside one another in publications and exhibitions and websites; they accumulate in family homes and sometimes, somewhat sadly, in junkshops (as Dinh Q. Le discovered). In the 21^st century, photographs continuously bombard us in online and offline environments, wherever we go.

1. Christopher Pinney, “Introduction: ‘How the Other Half…’,” in Photography’s Other Histories, ed. Christopher Pinney & Nicolas Peterson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 1. Emphasis added. ↩︎

2. Founded in 1955, documenta is an exhibition held in Kassel, Germany every five years. The 15^th edition, held in 2022, was curated by ruangrupa, a Jakarta-based artists’ collective. ↩︎

3. Munshi Abdullah [Munsyi Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir], The Hikayat Abdullah [1849], trans. A.H. Hill, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 28, no. 3 (171) (June 1955): 258. Emphasis added. ↩︎

4. Among the most recent are: Simon Soon, “Mapping Photographic Studios,” and K. Azril Ismail, “Calling It for What He Thought It Was…,” in Bayangnya itu Timbul Tenggelam: Photographic Cultures in Malaysia, eds. Rahel Joseph and Khat Mirzan (Kuala Lumpur: Ilham Foundation, 2020), 18–52 and 88–90. See also Janice Loo, “Daguerreotypes to Dry Plates: Photography in 19^th-Century Singapore,” BiblioAsia 15, no. 3 (October–December 2019): 8–19, accessed 3 February 2022, https://biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/files/pdf/vol-15/v15-issue3_Daguerreotypes.pdf ↩︎

5. Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 2, 16. Emphasis added. ↩︎

6. Peter Lee, “Peranakans and Photography: Invention, Reinvention, and the Camera’s Role in Cultural Disorder,” in Amek Gambar Taking Pictures: Peranakans and Photography, ed. Peter Lee (Singapore: Asian Civilisations Museum, 2020), 214. ↩︎

7. I thank Charmaine Toh for suggesting this. ↩︎

8. Larry J. Schaaf, Sun Gardens: Victorian Photograms by Anna Atkins (New York: Aperture, 1985), 11, 35. ↩︎

9. See Guan Fong Lee-Khoo, “Bird’s nest Fern,” Singapore Infopedia, accessed 3 February 2022. ↩︎

10. Atkins and Dixon had never travelled outside of the United Kingdom, and thus they relied on others to bring these botanical
    samples to them. ↩︎

11. Wu Si Jing, Lotus from the Mud, trans. Geraldine Chay, Wong Hooe Wai and Wong Marn Heong (Singapore: Asiapac Books, 2002), 184–5. ↩︎