25 years of Singapore images

[SINGAPORE] Singapore adjustments so rapidly that pictures taken solely a era in the past already really feel, properly, archival.

In one in all Tan Pin Pin’s black-and-white pictures from 1992, a younger lady in sun shades pushes by the cheerful crush of a faculty funfair, one hand sweeping again her hair. 

In one other, a girl in Orchard Road shields herself from the solar with a checked handkerchief. 

Nothing momentous is going on, which is exactly what makes the photographs by Tan – who’s now an acclaimed documentary filmmaker – so absorbing. 

These are strange Singaporeans caught earlier than the age of smartphones, social media and the compulsive documentation of on a regular basis life.

They type a part of 63 pictures from some 2,800 black-and-white negatives which Tan made as a 22-year-old returning to Singapore after time overseas, roaming the town to {photograph} every little thing 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 extra data.