I should be happily retired by now.
In the beginning, my focus was all about achieving super-artistic images. Bookings were healthy. After that fateful session, however, I began questioning my work.
I started to make increasingly confounding decisions. My focus gradually changed from “making money with amazing art” to “can I bring joy by being a better person”, and things got really complicated.
When the horrific Japanese Tsunami struck, I donated 100% of my sales to the Japanese Red Cross. I would do the same for the Nepal quake victims. I questioned if I could reach people beyond the happy and pretty pictures I make, and dived into charitable work like a man possessed.
I worked with various non-profit organisations. I organised volunteer trips to nursing homes – if you ever attended any, you might have seen how ape-crazy I got on occasions. I spent hours upon countless, late-night hours listening to the less fortunate. I grew attached to one bedridden elderly patient who had forgotten his birthday, and visited him often with chocolate cakes.
The experience was invigorating. I learnt so much from them, and I found new meaning in my work. I felt like I could touch the hearts of others, as they did mine.
I brought these lessons to my portrait and boudoir sessions, which became longer, and often more emotional. I rejected profit-maxing mentality, and my mind was full of how to understand people better. Of course making money was important, otherwise I’d truly be an angel from heaven with a Singaporean passport. I just couldn’t help but feel it’s the most important thing to do above all else. I encouraged freedom, and protested photography genres like pre-wedding, maternity, boudoir… why do we treat people like products? My sessions evolved from fun and empowering to a deeper sense of acceptance. Clients poured their hearts into what we nonchalantly call ‘reviews’, but words can never do justice to the experience.
Before you call this a success story, you have to realise that this mindset is bad for business. Successful entrepreneurs have repeatedly warned me that empathy is a tough sell. I didn’t listen, and I believed too much in making my work meaningful to realise that sales were plummeting.
Despite the supposed ‘good’ I was doing, I was fighting a silent battle against conservative norms. At our core, nudity remains taboo. For being a male boudoir photographer, I have been baited, harassed and mocked. Social media pushed the attention economy, style trumped over substance, and society at large has become even more judgemental. As if these weren’t enough, I was burning out from social work, and stopped visiting my elderly friend for months. When I finally picked myself up to pay a visit, he had already passed.
On a certain day in 2018, a couple visited our studio, and I shared some of our most meaningful sessions. They didn’t seem interested, and incessantly asked about mood-boards. Something snapped inside, and for the first time ever in my career I had to excuse myself, fearing I might lose control of my emotions.
At that moment I knew I had to make a stand: should I continue this so-called meaningful work, or join the noisy crowd?
I don’t like noise, and I don’t like crowds.
In the toughest times I leaned on the goodwill garnered through the years. Customers and fans encouraged me in different ways – you being present means a lot, because then I know I’m not alone. I leaned on the stories they wrote after the sessions. The experiences we shared gave me the resolve that my work is worth something.
Would things have been easier if I had chosen the pragmatic path? I might really have retired… sitting on a beach, watching my employees polish my helicopter… I can’t say. But I know there were forces I couldn’t control, including luck. I enjoyed wild peaks in profits, and anyone could call such things “success”, but it’s a journey, and there were times when I worried how many more months I would last. During Covid, for instance, income froze. For those who survived such desperate times, something else pulled us through, and it could never be money when we were staring at a dwindling account.
Whether my decisions were right or wrong, I would never be standing without the emotional support around me. I’m writing because I want to remain honest, to say I haven’t wavered in my belief, and above all, that I haven’t forgotten the people who’ve been so kind. Words like ‘grateful’ and ‘humble’ are thrown around too easily these days, but I cannot find any other way to express how thankful I am.
Things aren’t getting easier now. AI is changing what it means to make and consume creative work, and I fear that what’s meaningful in my work may no longer be. If, one day, you see me selling curry puffs, it won’t be because I have given up, but that my work is no longer relevant to others.
But that day hasn’t arrived. I’m still listening.
~.~