In 1898, G.R. Lambert & Co.'s photographic studio in Singapore offered an ever-expanding inventory of "views, panoramas, and native types" as cartes-de-visite and photographic souvenirs for European audiences and collectors. More than a century later, these images continue to circulate in national heritage databases, museum displays, and digital archives, constructing a visual fiction of colonial Singapore that shapes how the city-state's past is imagined, remembered, and taught. But whose Singapore do these images actually depict, and whose stories do they erase? Focusing on Singapore's colonial photographic archives, this paper examines how studio photography functioned as what Gayatri Spivak (1988) terms "epistemic violence": a systematic erasure that reduced the intelligence, cultural complexity, and individual agency of photographed subjects into consumable racial categories for imperial audiences. Posed against painted backdrops of Greek columns and imagined tropical foliage, labeled as "Chinese Hawker" or "A Kling Couple" (a now-derogatory term), these images reduced living persons to standardised types—objects of knowledge rather than knowing subjects. As Susan Sontag (1977) observed, photography became a means of symbolic possession. Yet colonial photography could never fully capture what it sought to contain. This paper argues that subjects whose gazes depart from the camera's intended narrative, cultural specificities that exceed studio staging, and the gaps between image and label all constitute forms of human intelligence that resisted colonial capture. Today, learning to read against these archives becomes essential to reclaiming historical agency and building more honest intercultural understanding for contemporary global citizenship.

Authors:
Lydia Wong-Plain, University of the Arts Singapore, Singapore

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Lydia Wong-Plain, Senior Lecturer, researcher, and curator at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Singapore. Interests: postcolonial museum studies, paracuratorial practice, Southeast Asian art. Current: climate imaginaries.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydia-wong-plain

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