Edmund Low (b. 1965, Singapore) grew up in Toa Payoh for more than 30 years until he got married and moved out to Farrer Park. Graduated from the National University of Singapore in Architecture (1994), he currently works as a full-time architect in a small private practice which he established in 2000. Other than practicing architecture, Edmund has always had an interest in photography; he has been taking photographs as a hobby since 1984. Most of his photos were originally coloured slides, some were black and white prints, which he has lost the roll negatives. Thanks to available technology, he was able to convert them to digital copies. Over the years, Edmund has become more inclined towards monochrome.
Practising architecture gives me a sense of self-assurance and purpose that I can say no other activity, perhaps only photography, can give me. This is despite my observing and experiencing that the noble profession of architecture has at times fallen short of its pursuit of the higher ideals and principles that it aspires to uphold. It is very difficult to describe the ambivalence that I feel when I have a desire to capture in photos places and buildings that I hold dear, and yet be in a profession that I constantly see being involved in the discourse, intervention, interpretation, conceptualisation and proposition of ideas and decisions that inevitably have a direct impact, adverse or otherwise, on such places and buildings.
Being born in the year 1965 has allowed me to witness and experience first-hand the rapid changes that Singapore has gone through, from 3rd world to 1st world in one generation, in my generation. When I was capturing some of these changes more than 30 years ago, I would never have anticipated back then that such changes would accelerate at a pace that it would turn my simple desire to take photos simply as a hobby into an impulse and later, an urgency. If I had to do it all over again, I would take even more photos that I already did. It is simply not enough.
