1. While I have certain issues with the phrasing of the premise, mostly because the overwhelmingly bourgeois self-perception of photographers in Singapore (especially prominent ones), there are some interesting and diverse opinions about Singaporean photographers and politics here, courtesy of Kevin at Invisible Photographer Asia: http://invisiblephotographer.asia/2015/09/19/sgphotography-pragmaticpolitics/

Those who know me knows I believe the two (politics and photography) cannot be separated, as I believe everything in life is political. Some can separate their work from their beliefs, but I think that does both a great disservice and can lapse into the worst sorts of rationalisation with some impressive linguistic acrobatics. Better to work for oneself and let others come to their own conclusions, misguided or otherwise.

2. “Like many others, for example Harry Callahan and Elliott Erwitt, Josef Koudelka has steadfastly made a refusal to construct verbal scaffoldings around his photographs.” — Mike Johnston

I work very much the same way, in complete understanding that most people prefer at least a small, interesting anecdote to go along with photographs. I personally enjoy such anecdotes when it accompanies good photographs, but those are rarities compared to the multitude of HONY-wannabes that might give you a great caption or story to elicit your warm-n-fuzzies in order to shore up weak photography.

Yeah, that’s what I think of HONY too. “Sorry, not sorry”, as the parlance goes.

3. For reading this far, here’s your reward: an art nude photo from my recent shoot with Mia. NSFW obviously.

Mia, Singapore, 2015. © 2015 Callan Tham. All rights reserved.

4. I responded to one of Format’s (which hosts my site and this blog) regular feedback surveys and asked about the RSS feature for the blog. This is their response:

“Sorry but our team have been busy with other projects and we haven’t been working on an RSS feed for our blogs.

I am unsure if this will be added as a feature in the future.”

That is disappointing. Format’s presentation for photographs is one of the best out there, and just a couple more features will make it a one-stop solution for people like me. Right now I’m wondering if I should continue to blog here, or move back to Tumblr, where it’s far easier to run a photo-diary/-blog deal compared to Format. Maybe I’ll just use their “blog” feature as “updates” or news”.

And yes, I know this isn’t the first time I’m talking about this. Big update post soon.