Yip Cheong Fun - Approach To Photography

Approach To Photography

In the early 1950s, working with a mere handful of contemporaries, Yip Cheong Fun faced a lot of difficulties, as described by Choy Weng Yang, the former curator at the National Museum of Singapore. Some of the difficulties were: an unsympathetic environment, scantiness of reference material, inadequate equipment, and a lack of guidance and direction. Yip’s solution to all these problems was experimentation in the form of trials and errors backed by a passionate spirit. Yip has always sought to take photographs which go beyond the surface of superficial attractiveness. His photographs must carry a telling message forged by crucial elements such as content, composition, light and timing. In Yip’s words, “a good picture must have the right balance and composition.”

It was possible to improve a photograph after it was developed. Yip chose only to crop and to enlarge. He never used sophisticated darkroom techniques as he took care to avoid the temptation to make a photograph through the manipulation techniques. Instead, he leaned heavily on his own judgment, experience, and intuition, as commented by Choy Weng Yang. “Yip’s approach to photography is not that of the photojournalist who must make news, nor the fashion photographer who must flatter, nor the industrial photographer who must explain, nor the publicity photographer who must be an image maker. His is the artist’s approach free of the functional constraints and yet must reach out for something else. Yip decides to express a fragment of his imagination.”

Yip also took a sincere and humanistic approach in photography. Mr. Andrew Yip, who is one of Yip Cheong Fun’s four sons and who displays and sells some of his father’s works together with his own poems at a stall near the Chinatown Heritage Center, described Old Yip’s photographic works on the website he has created for his father. “He (Yip Cheong Fun) understood how photography can be a great medium not just to record truth and beauty, but to capture the defining moments of the changes that affect all of us in any human situation, and to interpret the dynamic interplay of the elements that constitute life and the human spirit.” Indeed, the humanistic approach to photography was shown throughout his seascape photography, black-and-white photography, child portraiture and documentary photography.