John Clang is a photographer/visual artist.

He was born Ang Choon Leng in Singapore, earned his moniker in 1990 while in the National Service as his badge read C.L.Ang.

In the early 90s, being a Singaporean was extremely difficult to secure meetings locally. However, when he introduced himself as Clang, people were more receptive to meet him, thinking that he was from Europe. It must have been a great disappointment when they met him.
In 1999, he relocated to New York and was represented by Art + Commerce from 2002 to 2007.

Clang’s first exhibition, at age 20, was a duo-show at the controversial (and now defunct)
Singapore art group 5th Passage Artists. In 2001, he had his first solo exhibition at the Diane Von
Furstenberg Foundation in New York. He has since participated in more than 20 solo and group
exhibitions internationally. An installation of his personal work is in the permanent collection at
the Singapore Art Museum and his artwork is also collected by private collectors from around the
world.

A visionary in his own right, Clang continues to push the medium of photography to critical and
popular acclaim. Nuanced yet startling, simple yet profound; these seeming “images of the
mundane” that Clang created lift from the flow of an ordinary existence, seep into the cracks of
our collective consciousness — and tear it apart.

Artist Statement:

The mundane and the commonplace attract me — I always profess an affinity for subject matters closely related to my daily life. I resonate with subject matters closely related to my daily life. I often dwell upon urban and contemporary themes and landscapes; be it the city or its inhabitants. Intrigued by subtle changes in my environment, I find a corresponding shift in my feelings and thoughts. Hence, my images are a poetic reflection of myself in response to the nuanced changes in my environment.

In series like Silhouette/Urban Intervention (Black Tape), Strangers, Time, Out of Context, Beijing/NYC, Remembering Strangers, My Twilight Window and Self-reflection, I grapple with issues of estrangement and intimacy in an urban space; the displacement of familiar urban objects, views and perspectives; as well as our sense of identity and place in this world.

My images express an organic and poetic response to the nuanced shifts in my environment.My oeuvre reads like a visual diary, documenting my personal growth and critical thinking processes.

The deeply personal also occupies my work, specifically the themes of memory, identity and longing as a son living overseas for years and separated from my family back home. Many of my series narrate my inner landscape and narrative of emotional conflicts, specifically the themes of memory, identity and longing as a Singaporean in New York separated from my family. In series like Erasure and Guilt, I respectively explore the fears when contemplating the death of a loved one, and the guilt of disappointing our loved ones. Explorations of identity can also take a turn for the playful and provocative—as evidenced in lighter series like Beon Sleeps and Me and Friends.

Ultimately, a good photograph is one that brings us face to face with our own existence. It pulls the stranger standing next to us into the intimate radius of our life. It collapses the beauty and strangeness around us into one. It connects. A good photograph does all these.

See the interview with J. Clang by Sally Clarke:

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Don McCullin is an internationally famous photojournalist. He was born in 1935 in Finsbury Park in London, but left school at 15 without qualifications. During National Service in the RAF, he became a photographer. He later bought his own camera, but his mother had to buy it back after he pawned it. This was the camera with which he took his first published photo – of ‘The Guvners’, a local Finsbury Park gang, one of whose number had committed a murder – which appeared in The Observer in 1959.

He worked for The Observer for several years, and was delighted when they asked him to cover the Cypruswar in 1964. This was the beginning of his long career as a photographer of war and other human disasters.

Between 1966 and 1984, he worked for The Sunday Times Magazine. Pre-Murdoch, The Sunday Times was at the cutting edge of investigative, critical journalism. During the period of his finest magazine work, McCullin worked under Editor-in-Chief Harold Evans and Art Editor David King. His assignments included Biafra, the Belgian Congo, the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’, Bangladesh, the Lebanese civil war, El Salvador, and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. But he is most famous for his photos of Vietnam and Cambodia.

‘You have to bear witness’
McCullin faced no restrictions, yet his work, in projecting the realities of war into millions of living-rooms back home, contributed substantially to the growth of anti-war feeling. One reason was that McCullin’s sympathies were with the victims – the poor, the dispossessed, and ordinary soldiers on both sides.

McCullin is scathing about working as an ‘embedded’ journalist. ‘We spent years photographing dying soldiers in Vietnam, and they are not going to have that anymore… you have to bear witness. You cannot just look away.’

When he was refused permission to go to the Falklands in 1982, he assumed it was due to some kind of censorship. In fact, as he now knows, it was just down to bureaucracy: the Army had simply run out of press passes. Even so, an era was coming to an end. There has been no reporting from recent conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan comparable with that of McCullin in Vietnam.

‘Carrying pieces of human flesh’
McCullin took huge risks in order to take his photographs. He was threatened with a knife at a Muslim checkpoint in Beirut for having a Falangist press pass, blinded by CS gas during a riot in Derry, and wounded by fragments of mortar shell inCambodia. But he reports having been most frightened when arrested by Idi Amin’s thugs in Uganda and taken to a notorious prison where they were murdering hundreds of people every day with sledgehammers.

He survived; but damaged. He has a head full of demons, and bears a heavy burden of doubt and guilt. ‘Sometimes it felt like I was carrying pieces of human flesh back home with me, not negatives. It’s as if you are carrying the suffering of the people you have photographed.’

McCullin was dismissed from The Sunday Times shortly after it was taken over by Rupert Murdoch in 1981. Harold Evans resigned citing differences over editorial independence in 1982, and the photographer was then sacked by replacement editor Andrew Neil after he complained publicly about the newspaper’s lack of serious foreign and social coverage under the new regime.

Don McCullin now lives in Somerset with his third wife. He has five children by this and earlier marriages. These days, he spends much of his time taking landscape photos.

Don McCullin speaks exclusively with Military Times about his experiences at the Battle of Hue, as a major 50-year retrospective exhibition of his life and work opens at the Imperial War Museum London.

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Eve Arnold (1912-2012) is an American photojournalist and was the first female member of the Magnum Photos agency (in 1951, becoming a full member in 1957).

Arnold was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to immigrant Russian-Jewish parents, William (born Velvel Sklarski) and Bessie Cohen (born Bosya Laschiner).

Her interest in becoming a photographer began in 1946, when she worked for a photo-finishing plant in New York City. She briefly learned photographic skills in 1948 from Harper’s Bazaar art director, Alexei Brodovitch.

Arnold is best known for her benevolent, intimate images of actress Marilyn Monroe on the set of Monroe’s last (1961) film, The Misfits, but she took many photos of Monroe from 1951 onwards.

An exhibition of previously unseen photos of Monroe was displayed at the Halcyon Gallery in London in May 2005.

Marilyn trusted Arnold more than any other photographer, a relationship that is well-documented.

Due to Arnold’s sympathetic approach towards her subjects and protective nature of them afterwards, she is able to capture a closeness that is not easy for most others to capture. Not only has Arnold photographed VIPs such as Queen Elizabeth II, Malcolm X, and Joan Crawford, she has traveled extensively around the world, photographing in China, Russia, South Africa, and Afghanistan.

In 1980, she had her first solo exhibition which featured her photographic work in China at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. She also did a series of portraits of American Presidents’ wives.

Eve Arnold’s People 2009 Awards Received Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science, University of St. Andrews, Scotland, 1997. Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters, Staffordshire University. Doctor of Humanities, Richmond, the American International University in London. Master Photographer, International Center of Photography, NYC. Honorary OBE by the British Government.

Eve Arnold has published eleven books and has had innumerable exhibitions, both in Britain and abroad:

The Unretouched Woman, 1976
Flashback: The 50”s, 1978
In China, 1980
In America, 1983
Marilyn for Ever, 1987
Marilyn Monroe. An Appreciation. Photographs and text by Eve Arnold. 1987
Private View: Inside Baryshnikov”s American Ballet Theatre, 1988
All in a Day”s Work. Photographs by Eve Arnold – 1989
The Great British, 1991
In Retrospect, 1995
Magna Brava: Magnum”s Women Photographers (with Inge Morath, Susan Meiselas, Martine Franck, and Marilyn Silverstone), Nov. 1999

“I found myself in the privileged position of photographing somebody who I had first thought had a gift for the camera, but who turned out had a genius for it.” Eve Arnold

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