Yip Cheong Fun - Documentary Photography

Documentary Photography

Dr. Kelvin Tan, the president of the Singapore Heritage Society, said Yip Cheong Fun’s documentary photographs were “a powerful reminder of a way of life that is probably gone for ever.” Indeed, Yip has recorded a wide range of human activities that constituted a large part of Singapore’s cultural landscape in its early days. Indeed, we might see another Singapore when we look at a Taoist priest leaping through a wall of flame amid a flurry of “Hell Notes”, or the silhouette of a woman heaving a cart through a torrential downpour (See Photo 9), or an opium addict surrounded by waves of smoke, as described by the Straits Times journalist Corrie Tan.

The sensitivity to the changes in his social and physical environment, the persistence in recording the changes and the passion for photography had also enabled Yip Cheong Fun to document a large number of photographs showing the physical and social impact of urbanization. He visited the kampong sites more regularly. He took pictures on every aspect of life in Chinatown and its vicinity. “Chinatown was his passion and life; he would roam the streets, carrying a camera like a woman would carry a handbag,” said Mr. Andrew Yip describing his father’s passion for documentary photography. Yip used to stand on the same spot at New Bridge Road (New Bridge Road, alongside Eu Tong Sen Street, was the meeting place of Chinese immigrants in the early 1950s) in 1955 and again in 1978 to take pictures of Chinatown. The changes in 23 years were apparent when we compared the two images.

Dr. Kelvin Tan, president of the Singapore Heritage Society, defined the documentary photography as having the specific aim of recording a present reality for future generations. “Singaporeans must be made to realize great photographs are not the sole preserve of Henri Cartier-Bresson or Alfred Stieglitz. We have our own masters too. More important, they documented our past, not someone else’s.” Ken Kwek, a leading feature writer of the Straits Times, wrote the need to revive the waning art form of documentary photography and expressed his concern that “Singapore is forgetting the photo artists who spent their lives capturing a cultural landscape that would be rapidly effaced in the name of economic progress.” Yip, in his view, was one of the few photographers who have “registered the pain of modernization” poignantly. He also used Yip’s late 1960s photograph of an old tree crumbling in the foreground of a burgeoning metropolis as an example of the emotional schisms of urbanization.