001 - Ian Teh

Ian Teh has spent the past two decades working extensively in China on long term documentary projects. He has published three monographs, Undercurrents (2008), Traces (2011) and Confluence (2014), which was shot in Malaysia, where he is currently based. He has had numerous solo exhibitions and his work is featured in the permanent collections of a number of major museums. He has received several honours, including the Abigail Cohen Fellowship in Documentary Photography and the Emergency Fund from the Magnum Foundation. In 2013 he was elected by the Open Society Foundations to exhibit in New York at the Moving Walls Exhibition. In 2010, the acclaimed literary magazine Granta published a 10-year retrospective of his work in China. Here he discusses what he learnt from using his dad's camera; his early love of B&W and why he switched to colour; his formative experiences in Hong Kong and elsewhere; 'photographic grammar' and his abiding obsession with process; and how to shoot an entire photo book in 3 weeks.