The Sheer Act of Photography with Ying Ang

Artist talk with Ying Ang

Recorded April 28th, 2020

Documentary photographer Ying Ang joined us online from her home in Melbourne, Australia, to talk about the importance of “nurturing the instinctive impetus to photograph our own lives”.

“Much of what we make now as photographers, as people who in a very real sense make documents of histories, will escape our immediate understanding. By denying our personal photography…we run the risk of denying a future for images whose importance we have no concept of…but may yet filter through the course of time and find an important place beyond what we know or have the capability to understand.” - Ying Ang

Ying Ang is a celebrated documentary photographer based between Melbourne, Singapore, and New York. Ying has exhibited widely in group and solo shows internationally, and has been published in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Vice, and The Fader magazine. Her first artist book, Gold Coast, won the New York Photo Festival book prize for 2014, and was a finalist for Australian Photobook of the Year, the CREATE Award, the Guernsey Photography Festival Prize for 2015 and acquired for the Rare Books Collection at the Victorian State Library, along with many other awards. Her latest work, Bower Bird Blues, was a Vevey Images Grand Prix finalist in Switzerland, and honorably mentioned in the Julia Margaret Cameron Award, and shortlisted for the PHOTO2020 International Photobook Prize.

Ying’s COVID-19 diaries are part of our Featured Photographer series.

Ying Ang

Ying Ang