Photographic Collections as Visual Method

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).

• 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