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This book examines photographic collections as ways of doing and/or inspiring research in the humanities and social sciences.
Interweaving case studies and visual essays, this book:
- demonstrates the potential for photographic collections to launch new sociological, photographic, and creative work by scholars and practitioners;
- critically examines historical, social, and methodological issues revolving around a wide range of photographic collections in and of Asia;
- advances engagement with photographic collections as an innovative visual method in qualitative research.
Photographic Collections as Visual Method explores the ways in which photographic collections exceed their archetypal role as records of the past, to become not only a unit of analysis, but also the starting point for creative and critical work that intersects multiple disciplines. A wealth of data, stories, and inspiration, this book will appeal to scholars, students and practice-based researchers in the areas of visual and creative methods, especially methods for visual sociology and visual anthropology, photographic studies, museum studies, and area studies, with a particular focus on Southeast and East Asia.
List of contents
1. Introduction;
Part 1: Histories and Futures; 2. Photographic presences of Singaporean Women in Tech (1950s to 1980s);
3. Picturing Malaya: Uses of Photography in Singapore During the 1940s and 1960s; 4. Framing the Past and Future Narratives: Korean Photography Archives, 1920s-1960s; 5. Carl Alexander Gibson-Hill and Singapore Art History;
6. Debates in 1960s Korean Photographic Art: Realism and Formalism;
Part 2: Emerging Approaches to Photographic Collections; 7. Retro Colors and Technological Imagination: Trajectories of Hand-Coloring of Photography from the Nineteenth Century to the Digital Age; 8. Photography, Photocopying, and
Lianhuanhua: Mechanical Reproduction and Wang Youshen's Media Experiments in late 1980s China; 9. Photographing Kusu Island's Spiritual Materiality; 10. Technical Frames: Darkroom Printing and Frame Analysis in Narrative Inquiry; 11. The Search for Narrative: A Visual Essay of the Gibson-Hill Photographic Collection; 12. Creative Rephotography through Visual Autoethnography
About the author
Terence HENG is Reader in Sociology at the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom. He is the author of four books, including
Visual Methods in the Field (2016),
Of Gods, Gifts and Ghosts: Spiritual Places in Urban Spaces (2020) and
Diasporas, Weddings and the Trajectories of Ethnicity (2020) and co-editor of
Death and the Afterlife: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from a Global City (2024). His research ambulates through the intersections of cultural geography, visual sociology and photographic practice, investigating diasporic Chinese identities, sacred space-making amongst Chinese Singaporeans, and visual methods. Terence is the inaugural winner of the International Visual Sociology Association's Prosser Award for Outstanding Visual Methodologies, and 2016 winner of the Sociological Review's annual prize for best journal article.
OH Soon-Hwa is Associate Professor of Photography at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She has participated in about 100 international exhibitions, including the Asian Art Museum in Nice, France, the Noorderlicht Photo Festival in the Netherlands, the Lucca Photo Festival in Italy, the Pingyao International Photo Festival in China, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham, the Houston FotoFest, the Pochon biennale, the Ssamzi Art Space in Korea, the Asian American Art Center, and the Society for Contemporary Photographic Art. Her curatorial endeavours comprise shows at the National Museum of Singapore and the Pingyao International Photography Festival. Her monograph publications include
From Art School to Art World (2009),
Quiet Dream (2018), and
Liminal Landscapes 1940s-1960s (2025).
