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Photos in the Past

Past Times: A Social History of Singapore

Eds: Chan Kwok Bun and Tong Chee Kiong. Times Editions, 266 pages (including covers)

Photography has been called an art and a science. It is a science because it captures pictures with equipments utilising the principles of physics and chemistry. It is also supposed to provide empirical evidence unmarred by human subjective interpretation -though it is not unmarred from tampering, as many 'faked' photographs have proven. It is an art as where the artist or photographer's mastery of technique and composition could create an effect that is seldom seen in real life. It is a method beloved by scientists, social scientists and humanists alike when recording visual evidence. And photographs play a major role in the distillation of history in Past Times: A Social History of Singapore.

The cover title, Past Times, works as a double entendre. It could mean something one does during one's leisure, a hobby indulged in during one's past time. It could also mean a time in the past, a history. It is an apt title to package the essays that appear within the covers, as the contributors to the book explored the variegated meanings of Past Times.

With thirteen chapters- including the introduction and conclusion-and eleven contributors, this book can be considered a record of sociological and anthropological interpretations of various scholars on the social history of Singapore. However there is a slight unevenness in content. While some of the contributors injected their own analysis, biases and observations into their essays, some essays are written like a historical survey that one would be able to find in other books of similar nature. It is evident from some of the essays that the authors are newcomers to the field that they are writing on, while there are other essays that reveal the authors' deeper insight into the subjects of which they are writing. As when an author contributes to more than one essay, it is evident to the reader which essay is more favourable to the former.

All of the essays provide a variation to the theme of Singapore's history from the arrival of Stamford Raffles in the early nineteenth century until the nineteen-eighties. The topics explored range widely; discussing education, family ties, migrant issues, architecture and environment, women in society, societal changes, transport, food, leisure and religion. It is inevitable that some of the essays exploring each of these topics in turn would overlap with each other, as many of these activities and issues are intertwined with one another, like education, family, society and women's roles in society.

What is particularly poignant about this book is how the photographs are picked and laid out in a manner that complement the text, filling out the silences, sending out messages more fluent than flows of words ever could. What the editors of this book, and its contributors tried to do, and did rather well, is to construct a story that breathe life into the stills, and gave context and background information to the circumstances of the photographs. Yet the readers are given ample space to interject with their own interpretation and to understand the evolution that gave birth to the present day.

Through pictorial and textual narration, the authors and editors try to show how visuals can construct a national consciousness that differ from the official construction. Groups of marginalised or ignored sections of societies come back to haunt in the form of photographic evidence. As the concluding essay illustrates, photographs are not necessarily objective, and could be manipulated to play with human emotions, and even to distort the reality in hope of winning the support of its target audience. A photograph can be cold and cruel, or heart-warming and charming. It speaks as much of the photographer's agenda as the resistance and manipulation of the photographed.

A weakness in this book is that some essays seem to retell history in a conventional manner instead of providing the analytical background to the photographs that grace its text, and that the history of the Chinese are emphasised above that of the other races. Consciously or unconsciously, it emphasises the dominance of the Chinese in Singapore. On working with the unpublished photographic materials, it would had been better if there is more focus on these materials while drawing on available scholarship. As of now, there is an unevenness in the contributed essays, as a number do not challenge the mainstream reading of history, nor do they try to bring a different angle to what we already know. In other words, the use of photographs in some of these article serve a mostly decorative function, without any real analysis. Hence, they are rendered superfluous, which defeats the purpose of the book.

By doing so, it avoids falling into the trap between semi-scholarly work and a coffee-table book. However, I would emphasise that its strengths lay in its ability to recount the social history of Singapore, one that is intricately tied to Malaysia, and it does so wonderfully, and with great insight, through the judicious use of visuals.