I’ve known Alecia since her student days, when she worked with Samuel Woo on their quasi-activist photo installation, Shitlosophy. Since then, her work’s taken a more serious bent: now she’s specifically interested in portrait photography as a means of exploring the private worlds of the average human being.

 

She’s met a bewildering range of characters through her work: a karaoke champion, a 70 year-old drag queen, twin fashion models, Polish backpackers, a hairdresser from China obsessed with the colour red. For reasons of privacy, we’re going to let their photos tell their own stories, while we quiz Alecia on her own personal journey.

 

I would say in 2006, when I chose photography as my choice of medium. Prior to that, I did paintings and collage and illustration, but I never truly considered myself as an artist. When I found photography, I found that was my artist’s voice.

 

Definitely Hiatus. I think I really found a voice through portraiture that made me feel this was truly me being unique. In a lot of my previous work, I think I was subconsciously trying to emulate something else, but in my portrait work, I could definitely see a lot of me inside.

 

I was doing a photography class in the Maryland Institute College of Art, and I actually had the great opportunity to study under Connie Imboden: she’s quite a famous American photographer, very well known for her underwater portraits, very beautiful surreal images.   During this time she mentored this project of mine.

 

At that point I had this idea in my head that I wanted to do a project about what I called “breaking points”: how people often feel gaps in their lives, how people deal with loneliness. So I asked what activities do people do when they’re alone? How do people occupy these gaps in time, gaps in space?

 

I thought I needed to go and meet these people, so that was when I started to approach strangers. So I think I would say this series is a series of encounters with people. And I learned something with each of these individuals in the short or long time I spent with them.

 

The first photograph I took was of Emory, the man in the hotel. He works as a painter in the hotel. And that really gave me the confidence to carry on with the project. It taught me that each time you make a photograph with a stranger, it is an adventure. That’s what keeps me going as a photographer. You never know what you’re going to get.

 

 

I was doing research online on what people do to occupy their time, and I actually found there was a Baltimore Cross-dressing Club, hosted in a place called the Play House. It’s actually a fetish club, run by the LGBT community. You can be straight, but as long as you have a fetish you’re welcome at the club.

 

It was quite a surreal experience for me. They took me to a gathering where they had all these different booths so they could introduce you to different kinds of fetishes, from electric sensations, to syringes, to dominatrix play. There were fresh, crazy things happening constantly. You just take it as it comes. My personal boundaries were constantly being challenged by all these people who were introducing all these sensations with such normalcy.

 

I think in a lot of ways, when I get to know them, everybody is like everybody else: they’re all trying to find a direction in life; they all have a lot of questioning of their own to do. I think they wanted to reach out – that’s why they would give their time to photographers like myself. They want to know how they can contribute.

 

You know, there’s always a reason why people would want to spend time with you. You’re trying to get something from them, they’re trying to get something form you. And I think fundamentally these projects have always been an adventure. In all my work, even in Singapore, there’s just that journey of traveling, going into a new space.

 

 

I had the chance to meet the art director Johnny Lau. I showed him my Hiatus work, and later when he had the chance to do something with the Gallery Hotel, he thought of me.  So he gave me a call and asked me if I was interested in interpreting the space and the guests, but in my own way.

 

That was really a rare but a perfect opportunity in me, because it retains that sense of adventure, but in a very unique space. [Hotel rooms] are very temporary spaces: each time a guest comes in, the space is transformed. Then the cleaner comes in and changes the sheets, and things are renewed again.   And I like the sense that the space is exclusive. You pay for your privacy; there’s a price tag attached to it. And I think it’s very unique that someone would want to spend their private resting time with a photographer.

 

So I kind of was stalking the guests in the hotel: over breakfast, at the swimming pool and in the lobby. I tried my best to be very professional and not creepy, but I was constantly checking out people. You know the way they move: there are some people whom you just know will be very photographable.

 

Thankfully no-one, complained to the management. I’m still personally trying to work out, if I were to redo this project, how would I get more people to say yes.

 

 

When people who look at Hiatus, they don’t see it as Singaporean at all, but it’s actually a very important project of mine. After taking these photos overseas, I knew I had to come back home and do something truly, truly Singaporean; truly, truly me, and that’s why I did Home Visits. I was trying to get to know the place where I lived again.

 

After visiting my first few homes, I soon realised I was interested in people’s possessions. And of course the relationships of the people living in these spaces, and also their relationships with the objects which they own. I think memory is embodied in objects. And that’s something you can’t take away. Your memory of a particular moment changes all the time, but objects retain a certain memory, and that, in some way, cannot be altered. So when I go into a person’s space, I can see all these traces of memories. I was trying to draw the connection between the owner and what he had, what he held. 

 

It was almost like an anthropologist’s journey. And I think one very, very important realization I had in the process of making Home Visits was how the images subtly hint of what people do when they’re lonely – returning back to the theme of Hiatus.

 

 

It’s still very male-dominated, and it’s still very hard for a woman to be seen as good. But now there are a lot of women who are recognised for their fine art photography, like Samantha Tio and Erica Lai.

 

Men typically find a lot of success in the commercial photography. But once you get recognised for being good in a specific area, you will be known for that. So a lot of commercial male photographers are not as known as female photographers for their personal fine art work.

 

In the art market, there’s still a lot of demand for straight photography, as opposed to conceptual photography. For curators, it’s especially challenging. 

 

Conceptual photographers often say they’re artists who use photography as their medium of choice, like Thomas Demand: he likes to construct elaborate sets, then he photographs one image only, and he destroys the set. This kind of process has a certain place in art history. It’s a clear and easily understood art process, so curators can understand it. Whereas with my photography, how do I explain to curators the process of getting to know all these strangers?

 

The process of straight photography is not so easy to define. Photography is very unique. And I think, increasingly, more curators and art critics are starting to see that. They have to judge photography as a medium unto itself.