Snapshots: Jason Koh
By Damian Koh
06/11/2006
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/digitalcameras/0,39001469,61965068,00.htm
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Often we snap pictures without thinking, or rather that's what most people do. Yours truly is also guilty of it. Take a step back and think about your picture. Are you where most other people are standing and snapping the same picture millions of others have done so before? Even if you have a perfect shot, with the perfect composition and balance of colors, that's not art. Art is something beyond the visual appeal with a certain rigor and discipline, says Jason. Do you agree?
The images you see from this feature have been reproduced with permission from Jason Koh. If you wish to be featured in our interviews or know any photo buffs who may be interested, write to us, and we'll get back to you.
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Name: Jason Koh
Type of photographer: Conceptual
Equipment: Canon EOS 20D, Olympus E-500, an old Minolta, Nikon F55
Accessories: A couple lenses, a battered tripod, pen and paper
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What he says:
"My sordid love affair with photography began at the age of 14, when I first spied Dad's Minolta peeking out of a trunk in the storeroom. I remember taking it out of the bubble wrap, twisting the knobs and dials, pushing buttons, triggering the flash and giving my grandmother a nasty fright. She was one of those superstitious old ladies who didn't like cameras and, come to think of it, that scowl on her face would have been priceless. It's just too bad Grandma didn't approve back then. She'd turn in her grave if she knew I've danced so often with the likes of Holga, Canon, Nikon and, most recently, Olympus.
I'm a self-taught photographer. I didn't attend any courses at the Photographic Society. I didn't major in photojournalism in school. All I had back then was a dusty camera manual, a few rolls of expired film, and a vague inkling of how I wanted to compose each piece. My earliest works were experiments in the medium, with me finding new ways to play with the camera and film, all fun and games. There was something intrinsic, something fundamental missing from the relationship, but I didn't know what it was, and the interest panned out.
I moved on, did the whole angsty teenager thing. And then, it hit me, somewhere on the threshold of the Singapore Art Museum, as I was staring into space, high on wine, agonizing over the next line of black poetry. That missing element that had driven my camera lust into torpor was the lack of auteurial intent. I was merely the passive observer behind the lens, a casual cataloguer of events, a (God forbid!) photojournalist!
That's when I realized that I had to engage the subject on the level of artist and canvas, that more than just painting a pretty picture, that instead of just focusing on the shot, the colors, the composition, which beyond just visual appeal, the piece had to have a certain rigor and discipline, and inherent meaning.
From that day on, I resolved to do conceptual photography, writing visual poetry with light and shadow, and the shades of grey in between.
I flirt infrequently with color, my main body of work is in black and white, and the choice is a personal one. There are some things that vividity can express, but there are also some things that only its absence can truly master."
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Name: Jason Koh
Type of photographer: Conceptual
Equipment: Canon EOS 20D, Olympus E-500, an old Minolta, Nikon F55
Accessories: A couple lenses, a battered tripod, pen and paper
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Black Sun, Balloon Trivia
What struck me when I first glimpsed the DHL balloon at Bugis was how much it resembled a corpulent, second sun. A second glance, though, evoked thoughts of a grasping spider, thrusting its legs into the gondola, holding those within captive in a vice-like grip, cables like strands of webbing secreted from a spider's spinnerets. It was as if those tourists braving the ride were trapped, at this disquieting vision's mercy, and at the same time mortified. Those filament thin cords looked, at least from a distance, like they could snap at any time. The absence of color was a conscious decision on my part. It reinforced the spider illusion and drew attention to the shapes and wires, something which color would have otherwise ruined.
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Name: Jason Koh
Type of photographer: Conceptual
Equipment: Canon EOS 20D, Olympus E-500, an old Minolta, Nikon F55
Accessories: A couple lenses, a battered tripod, pen and paper
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Dropbats, Marble Trash
Daily, we are bombarded by all sorts of visual stimuli, as well as "visual trash", which all too often results in mental and visual fatigue. This piece attempts to give voice to that, simulating the rape of the eye as it stares glassily into the depths of a kaleidoscope. It wasn't an entirely difficult picture. I did it with butterscotch liquor and Sprite, on the rocks.
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Name: Jason Koh
Type of photographer: Conceptual
Equipment: Canon EOS 20D, Olympus E-500, an old Minolta, Nikon F55
Accessories: A couple lenses, a battered tripod, pen and paper
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Flare, Homogeneity, Passivity
This piece is a take on the notion of the journey, inspired by the Wizard of Oz's yellow brick road, as well as those cheesy shots of long and winding trails with an excess of cloud cover and sky in Hollywood narrative. The elements blend together to create a semblance of a path leading to nowhere, while the sun beats down relentlessly overhead. Of course, you'll never catch a scene such as this on the mainland. The illusion is crafted by flowing water and the wake of a bumboat en route to Pulau Ubin.
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Name: Jason Koh
Type of photographer: Conceptual
Equipment: Canon EOS 20D, Olympus E-500, an old Minolta, Nikon F55
Accessories: A couple lenses, a battered tripod, pen and paper
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Gilded Cage
I was bored in the office and decided to have a bit of fun with this one, giving weight to the proverbial "rat race" that seems to dog most established economies. It's a parallel for the plight of many an office worker, stuck in the glass menagerie that is the office, scrabbling daily for the castoffs and scraps of commerce. Not everyone's got what it takes to be the big rat, but it's always nice to dream.
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Name: Jason Koh
Type of photographer: Conceptual
Equipment: Canon EOS 20D, Olympus E-500, an old Minolta, Nikon F55
Accessories: A couple lenses, a battered tripod, pen and paper
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Message in a Bottle
This piece explores one facet of communication, the value of the written word, and how, in this age of cell phones and Internet messaging, there might be something infinitely more touching, infinitely more human in an anachronism such as this. Of course, there are just as many hiccups in communication, and it's just as likely that not every bottle bobbing through that ocean might reach shore.
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Name: Jason Koh
Type of photographer: Conceptual
Equipment: Canon EOS 20D, Olympus E-500, an old Minolta, Nikon F55
Accessories: A couple lenses, a battered tripod, pen and paper
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Selective Massacre, Sunflowers
This piece was done as a visual study of Van Gogh's Sunflowers, questioning not only the value of an art piece, but also standard conventions of photography and the notion of tasteful cropping. Most photographers tend to shy away from chopping off parts of the subject with the camera, but I've always believed that doing so sometimes enhances, rather than detracts from the picture.
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Name: Jason Koh
Type of photographer: Conceptual
Equipment: Canon EOS 20D, Olympus E-500, an old Minolta, Nikon F55
Accessories: A couple lenses, a battered tripod, pen and paper
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RGBY: Blue Dubba Dee
I took this photo to supplement a story I wrote using free association techniques inspired by the Surrealist discipline. This was another visual experiment with glass beads and Sprite Ice to create a kaleidoscopic vision; a study of the interactions between bubbles and sea foam, or perhaps the last sight of a swimmer drowning in a frozen lake. Carbonated drinks tend to produce enough bubbles that cling to glass to create the look.
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Name: Jason Koh
Type of photographer: Conceptual
Equipment: Canon EOS 20D, Olympus E-500, an old Minolta, Nikon F55
Accessories: A couple lenses, a battered tripod, pen and paper
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Faces, MBC
I took this piece during the Canon Digital Life Photo Marathon. The theme of the hour was faces and, instead of taking pictures of old people or children, or clocks and idols and statues, I figured the main emphasis of the work should be on the amateur photographers, on those nameless and faceless individuals who were trying to make their mark by winning something of this sort. Like the works of anti-artists from the Dada movement of the 1920s, it was also meant to satirize the entire process, to poke fun at established norms of good photography, and the thread was a common one throughout the photos I shot on that occasion.
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Name: Jason Koh
Type of photographer: Conceptual
Equipment: Canon EOS 20D, Olympus E-500, an old Minolta, Nikon F55
Accessories: A couple lenses, a battered tripod, pen and paper
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False Dawn, Red Sky at Night
I shot this at dusk, off the top of the DHL balloon, as I saw the last rays of the setting sun fade across the horizon, capping the buildings of the commercial district in black and red. It appeared very much like the island's own take on a nuclear holocaust. I found the scene rather evocative as, perhaps, a portent, or a precursor of things to come.
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Name: Jason Koh
Type of photographer: Conceptual
Equipment: Canon EOS 20D, Olympus E-500, an old Minolta, Nikon F55
Accessories: A couple lenses, a battered tripod, pen and paper
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Perhaps Love
I have an old typewriter lying around in the back room, a relic like the Minolta I first started out with. The bulk of its keys are scraped off, or stained, or otherwise illegible, and those few letters left spell, amusingly, "Perhaps Love", or any other number of words, if you look hard enough. This piece can be read any number of ways. The typewriter could be a face, the title and addons merely subtext, but I'd like to think it characterizes the ever-present dilemma of how to communicate that love to someone else, how to tell someone you love them?
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Name: Jason Koh
Type of photographer: Conceptual
Equipment: Canon EOS 20D, Olympus E-500, an old Minolta, Nikon F55
Accessories: A couple lenses, a battered tripod, pen and paper
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RGBY: Toy Soldiers
This piece hails from the same series as Blue Dubba Dee and, this time, it features those dollar-a-bag plastic men I used to play with when I was much, much younger. It paints a vision of imaginary warfare and conflict, of pointing guns and fingers at perceived threats, of vigilance gone to waste and aggression directed at shadows. Like Blue, it was inspired by a Surrealist story I attempted as part of a creative exercise.
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Name: Jason Koh
Type of photographer: Conceptual
Equipment: Canon EOS 20D, Olympus E-500, an old Minolta, Nikon F55
Accessories: A couple lenses, a battered tripod, pen and paper
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Darkness, Ode to Black
This final piece is perhaps the most unusual and cryptic conceptual piece I have created to date. It was taken during the Canon Digital Life Photo Marathon, premised on the theme of darkness. If photography is the study of light and its interplay with objects and elements, what then is this empty canvas, with naught but a patch of black? This piece seeks to challenge that convention that even the absence of an image remains a photograph, that it holds its place as a form of high art. Ultimately, it is the intent, and the interpretation of the work, and the valuation placed upon it by the artist and its viewers, that elevate it to that platform.
Visit http://crimson-shirou.deviantart.com for more of Jason's works.
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