1st Edition

Photographic Collections as Visual Method Innovation and Creativity in Asia

Edited By Terence HENG, Soon-Hwa OH Copyright 2026
214 Pages 67 Color Illustrations
by Routledge

214 Pages 67 Color Illustrations
by Routledge

214 Pages 67 Color Illustrations
by Routledge

This book examines photographic collections as ways of doing and/or inspiring research in the humanities and social sciences. Interweaving case studies and visual essays, this book: demonstrates the potential for photographic collections to launch new sociological, photographic, and creative work by scholars and practitioners; critically examines historical, social, and methodological... Read more

1. Introduction

Terence HENG and OH Soon-Hwa

Part 1: Histories and Futures

2. Photographic Presences of Singaporean Women in Tech (1950s to 1980s) 

LIEW Kai Khiun and Natalie PANG

3. Picturing Malaya: Uses of Photography During the 1940s and 1960s

OH Soon-Hwa

4. Framing the Past and Future Narratives: Korean Photography Archives, 1920s–1960s

Phil LEE

5. Carl Alexander Gibson-Hill and Singapore Art History

Siew Kah YOW

6. Debates in 1960s Korean Photographic Art: Realism and Formalism

Sangwoo PARK

Part 2: Emerging Approaches to Photographic Collections

7. Retro Colours and Technological Imagination: Trajectories of Hand-Colouring of Photography from the 19th Century to the Digital Age

Yajing LIU 

8. Photography, Photocopying, and Lianhuanhua: Mechanical Reproduction and Wang Youshen’s Media Experiments in Late 1980s China

CHEN Shuxia

9. Photographing Kusu Island’s Spiritual Materiality

Terence HENG

10. Technical Frames: Darkroom Printing and Frame Analysis in Narrative Inquiry

Andrew Hin Nam FONG

11. The Search for Narrative: A Visual Essay of the Gibson-Hill Photographic Collection

Clara CHONG, LEW Yi Xuan and WEE Sher Ying

12. Creative Rephotography through Visual Autoethnography

Terence HENG

Biography

Terence Heng is Reader in Sociology at the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom. He is the author of four books, including Visual Methods in the Field (2016), Of Gods, Gifts and Ghosts: Spiritual Places in Urban Spaces (2020) and Diasporas, Weddings and the Trajectories of Ethnicity (2020) and co-editor of Death and the Afterlife: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from a Global City (2024). His research ambulates through the intersections of cultural geography, visual sociology, and photographic practice, investigating diasporic Chinese identities, sacred space-making amongst Chinese Singaporeans, and visual methods. Terence is the inaugural winner of the International Visual Sociology Association’s Prosser Award for Outstanding Visual Methodologies, and 2016 winner of the Sociological Review’s annual prize for best journal article.

OH Soon-Hwa is Associate Professor of Photography at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She has participated in about 100 international exhibitions, including the Asian Art Museum in Nice, France, the Noorderlicht Photo Festival in the Netherlands, the Lucca Photo Festival in Italy, the Pingyao International Photo Festival in China, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham, the Houston FotoFest, the Pochon biennale, the Ssamzi Art Space in Korea, the Asian American Art Center, and the Society for Contemporary Photographic Art. Her curatorial endeavours comprise shows at the National Museum of Singapore and the Pingyao International Photography Festival. Her monograph publications include From Art School to Art World (2009), Quiet Dream (2018), and Liminal Landscapes 1940s-1960s (2025).