The Big Picture

IN AN AGE where we have access to countless online images while producing thousands of our own for social media, what makes a photograph stand out in the crowd? What differentiates an ingenious shot from a merely well-composed one? What gets remembered?

These are some of the questions that the Singapore International Photography Festival seeks to answer as it returns for its sixth and biggest edition. From now till Dec 9, the festival is hosting 11 exhibitions across the island as well as a record number of workshops, seminars and masterclasses.

Of these, the solo exhibition that's already drawn swarms of millennials is that of cult photographer Nguan. The reclusive Singaporean shutterbug has rarely allowed himself to be photographed. But that hasn't stopped his gorgeous candy-coloured street photographs to amass some 150,000 followers on Instagram while getting splashed in every top photography publication. His show titled Singapore is now on at Gillman Barracks and depicts our concrete jungle in a soft palette of colours that renders the familiar strange and the old new.