The various facades of the studio in the 1960s and 1970s. Bottom left: Firecrackers were used to celebrate the 9th anniversary of the studio.

The busiest time every year at the studio was always immediately after the Chinese New Year celebration, when an increase in photo print requests meant working into the wee hours at the photo studio for the Keuk family. After the doors closed at 9pm, Gin Bok would enter the dark room to develop films and prints. The dark room is perpetually humid. And with chemical solutions and water running continuously, Angela worried for her father’s rheumatism. His fingers were stained brown from the chemical solutions, which are mixtures of powder formula and water of right proportions. Films and prints are meticulously soaked in these solutions, before running through with clear water.

Angela remembered him to be an extremely hardworking father, who would work long hours to provide for his family of six. Despite his busy schedule, Gin Bok insisted driving the children to their school. There were times when he was delayed in the studio, which meant teary eyes for the children who had to wait patiently at the school gates for their father to fetch them.

Kuet Gin Bok in his studio (left) and repairing a studio spot light. Top right: An old envelope for the photographs.

Views of Changi Road from the studio in the 1960s.

Flooding in the studio.

Gin Bok voluntarily took photos for the neighbours and friends, including the kacang putih seller, who sells Indian snacks typically made of nuts and spices. He was well-liked by his customers due to his photography skills and eloquence, and thus the studio was the meeting point of friends and relatives.

“Life was simpler,” said Angela of the good memories growing up at the photo studio. Floods were common and water would overflow into the shop space. The family would prop the equipment up on tables and stilts to keep them dry. Together with her elder sister and two younger brothers, she remembered each day filled with tasks with for the family business, like drying the photos in a giant air dryer and cutting the photo borders away to the correct sizes. The studio closes on Fridays.

The Kuet siblings drying the prints.

Angela says of her childhood growing up with her siblings, “We were so fortunate that my father used to take us out for activities on Fridays or school holidays. We went swimming at the Changi seaside, visited and took photos at popular sites like the Queen Elizabeth Walk, Botanic Gardens, Fort Canning Hill, National Theatre,Van Kleef Aquarium, Mount Faber and Katong Park. We also visited our maternal grandmother at her coffee shop. Sometimes after the studio closed at 9pm, we would follow my father to send some photos for framing, colouring (for the black and white photos) or to send the clients’ cameras for repair.”

Top and bottom left: Changi Beach and Golden Palace Holiday Resort (金宫水上游乐场). Right: Kallang Park

Left: Ocean Park Hotel at East Coast Road. Right: Tan Kim Seng fountain at the Esplanade Park.

Queen Elizabeth Walk

Before digital ‘photoshop’, workers used sharpened lead to edit films and touch up prints using manual techniques. There were also times when newly weds would form long queues outside the photo studio for their wedding portraits to be taken. Photographs were almost always of happy occasions.

After retiring his photo studio business in 1987, Gin Bok turned to chinese calligraphy, a form of art he had been practising in the 1980s. Impressed and awed by his beautiful calligraphy, his studio clients would ask for his work, in forms of festive couplets and even writing requests.

Kuet Gin Bok, his relatives and friend visiting the Tiger Balm Gardens in 1952.

Gin Bok passed away in May 2014. He had left behind a huge collection of diaries which he had been writing continuously over his lifetime. Writings, like photographs, are moments captured of a certain past. In a way, that moment has ‘died’ because it does not belong to the present. The act of reading, or looking at these photographs however, transports the viewer back to these times which are considered important to the writer or photographer. For a moment, albeit temporarily, the viewer re-lives in that moment and he/she gained an experience and understanding why that moment in time is so important to the writer/photographer. It might take a while for Angela before she has the courage to read and re-live those diaries her father left behind. When she did, she will realise that they are reminders of how her father talks, moves and thinks. These moments are constantly living and it is an entry to his understanding of the world.

The shop of ‘New City Photo Studio’ is currently an eatery specialising in black chicken tonic soup, owned by an old neighbour who knew the Kuet family for a long time while working nearby the shop as a stall assistant. Angela’s daughter is now a photographer, whose interest started after receiving her grandfather’s Leica camera on one of her birthdays.

2012 photo taken at the site of the former studio, showing Mr. Kuet and his wife together with the owner of the current shop.

All photo credits to Angela Kuet and Kuet Gin Bok.
Written and edited by Tan Wei Keong

To start, I was skype-chatting with a long-time friend, Daphne Ang, who was recently at the NUS Museum doing a research fellowship on portrait studios in Singapore from the late 19^th to early 20^th century. I had sadly missed the city tour that she had conducted here, but I was fortunate to chat with her remotely in London where she is pursuing her PhD in an extension of her research on the early commissioned portraits. Daphne also has a project called “Portraits of the Straits” that is very close to what SG Snaps aspires to unveil, but with a more scholarly angle. Together, Daphne and I had taken a look at some of the studio photographs from the SG Snaps collection and it turned out that majority of the images were dated beyond the 1940s into the 1990s, outside the scope of her research. So she psyched me up in investigate the photographs from post-independence era, in hope that I could conceivably create a chronological continuity for the studio portraits throughout the history of Singapore.

1. Studios moved from the city into the neighborhoods through the early to the late 20th century.

In Daphne’s research of the early photography studios, she wrote about how the pioneer studios ran by European photographers were first located at the heart of commerce – along High Street, Stamford Road and North Bridge Road. However in the 1890s, Chinese-operated photography studios began to flourish in the Chinese quarters of the city, like Koon Sun Photo Studio along South Bridge Road.

Koon Sun Photographer at 179 South Bridge Road in the early 20th century. Photo: National Archive of Singapore, Source: Lee Hin Ming

We found out, from the addresses printed on studio portraits collected by SG Snaps, that after the 1950s, locations of new photo studios had spread further out into the neighborhoods with the establishments of new towns in Singapore. It is common for the studios to be at the ground floor of public housing buildings, like the one in the image below.

Bride, groom, best man and bridesmaid pose outside a photo studio in the 1980s. Photo: National Archives of Singapore, Source: Ronni Pinsler

Understanding how the earliest studio portraits were commissioned by the more affluent community and thinking of photographs as tokens of identity, could this movement of photo studios into the neighborhoods signify the desire of a growing middle class to create representations of themselves?

2. The props and backgrounds evolved to reflect the times.

Early studio portraits were very elaborate in dressing the set and the sitters. In the Chinese tradition of portrait-making, photographs were composed quite similarly to the paintings.  The level of intent placed in picturing the sitter and his/her status was so careful, to the extent that adornments signifying status will be drawn on its absence.

Early portrait of a Chinese matriarch, possibly not taken in Singapore, with jade bangles and rings drawn directly onto the print. Photo: Lee Fook Weng

A studio portrait of a Chinese lady with a gold jewellery and jade pendant drawn on to the photographic print. Photo: Evelyn Tan

Though commissioned studio portraits had evolved to be less decorative and simpler over the years, the props used reflected its current trend.

Two ladies having fun during a shooting session with an electric guitar and microphone. Photo: Lim Poh Kwuan

A lady wearing a kebaya posing with a radio and telephone. Photo: Seow Shin Horng

Props and backgrounds aside, the fashion of the times makes too for a standout statement.

Photo: Mabel Sim

3. The advent of the air-conditioner.

In hot and humid Singapore, it became an important consideration for the customers whether a photo studio has air-conditioning, or not. Who would want to be sweating at the once-in-a-lifetime photo session? Thus, many photo-studios emphasised and promoted their air-conditioned studios at the corner of their prints to win over customers and to keep up with competition.

Wedding couple in a studio with an air-condition system called the “Cool-lit”. Photo: Lee Fook Weng

With the growing popularity of western gowns and suits for wedding portraits, an air-conditioned studio were more ideal and popular for photographs compared to the sweltering heat of the outdoors.

A portrait taken at the Golden Studio that had air-condition facilities. Photo: Lee Ah Dah

4. Transitioning from black-and-white to coloured prints.

During the days of black-and-white photography, colours envisioned by the photographers were colored by hand onto either the glass plate of the negative or onto the print itself.

Hand-coloured portrait. Photo: Lee Fook Weng

Hand-coloured photograph of a boy. Photo: Wong Meng

In the 1970s, colour photography became available and made a swift entrance into the output of photo-studios in Singapore. The demand for colour images was high. Towards the 1980s, the black-and-white photographs were only reserved for passport photos. According to Mr. Ang Mong Kee, a photo-studio owner along Henderson Road in the 1980s, it was common for photo studios to bring color negatives to an external lab as the color-photo developing machines were too expensive for small independent studios. The black-and-white photographs were, however, processed on-site at the studio.

Color photo of a family. Photo Lim Mui Tiang

Looking through the photographs during our collection drive, many contributors agreed with us that the quality of black-and-white photographs endure the test of time better than the coloured ones. We found many of the colour photographs, though newer than the black-and-white’s, had entered into advance stages of deterioration. Like in the photo above, the strongest pigment left behind is the red, resulting in a pinkish tint to the photograph.

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Understanding the procedures of analog photography has definitely allowed me to appreciate better the level of workmanship gone into mastering the craft of studio portraits. It is extremely challenging to make a good studio shot, and I have developed a new level of respect for our pioneer photographers. In regards to the photographs collected to be emblems of aspirations of a community in that era, they have given us much insight into how identity continues to be shaped in the way we present our own image as tokens of history.

Written by Samantha Tio
Edited by Tan Wei Keong