Marjorie Doggett - in three histories...
…or four really, since it is also a story of Singapore publishing… this based on a short speech I made at the launch of Marjorie Doggett’s Singapore: a Photographic Record, published by the Photographic Heritage Foundation, Hong Kong, with NUS Press, and supported by the Ng Teng Fong Charitable Foundation. The book was launched by Mr K. Shanmugam, Minister for Home Affairs and Minister for Law, who was the Doggett’s neighbour for several years.
“I want to talk about Marjorie and the Marjorie Doggett collection in the context of not one but three different histories - the history of photography in Singapore, the history of the performing arts in Singapore, and the history of Singapore’s built environment.
The history of photography in Singapore and Southeast Asia is really just beginning to be written, particularly a history of the more locally-grounded photography that succeeded the photography of empire, in the 1930s and then emerging more powerfully in the years after World War II. The written history of Malayan photography, Singapore photography, has hardly moved beyond the outline sketch, the first efforts to breakdown received hierarchies and think afresh. There’s much to sort out here - particularly as there are so many different kinds of photography, so many different ambitions of photographers, and different audiences for photography, different uses of photography.
No matter how that overall story is eventually written, it is certain that Marjorie Doggett will be seen as a key figure. This book and exhibition will be important milestones in the historiography. She stands out for several reasons, not least as a woman in a male-dominated field. She and Lady Yuen-Peng McNeice, the sister of Lok Wan Tho, are among the very few women photographers exhibiting their work in this period.
And Marjorie Doggett went beyond most of her colleagues, as Ed Stokes points out in his text for the book, in the way she carefully pursued a thematic photographic project for publication, working to capture Singapore’s architecture as of 1955 and 1956. Unlike salon photographers searching for those one or two prize-winning shots, the fisherman seen through his nets, etc, Marjorie Doggett developed her theme across years of photos, deepening her knowledge about the subject matter as she developed her skill. In this she was supported by architect friends, mentors like famed curator Carl Gibson-Hill and not least, her publisher, Donald Moore.
Marjorie’s work is also important for a second history, for she also photographed the lively classical music scene in Singapore in the 1950s and 60s. Her husband Victor was a mainstay of this scene, as a leading music teacher and music critic in Singapore. In fact many will recognize the Doggett name for Victor’s work more than Marjorie’s. The Marjorie Doggett collection, now, thanks to Nick Doggett, in the care of our National Archives, will be an important source when we get round to rediscovering the lively cultural history of late-colonial Singapore. The Archive holds many wonderful photos, but also letters and newspaper clippings.
And third, any of you with an interest in Singapore’s architectural heritage will know of Marjorie Doggett, and see her as important to that history. The architectural photographs you see here were first published by Donald Moore as Characters of Light, in 1957. Marjorie is clearly focused on the form of these buildings, seeing them as figures, characters, created by light and shadow. They are technically excellent efforts at capturing the built form in the tropical sunlight. But some of you may miss the human element. We must recognize that Doggett doesn’t seek to portray the social realities of life around and inside these buildings.
And I think it’s the weight of that social reality that determined that Marjorie’s book had perhaps less impact than her publisher expected when it was first released. Efforts by others in her circle to argue for more conservation of the buildings of Singapore didn’t get very far either. In the 1950s ‘60s and ‘70s, the shophouses of Singapore were a source of shame and anger, overcrowded, unhealthy. Singapore’s highest policy priority was to create new housing and new jobs, often in new industrial estates, for a young, growing population. Well, we all enjoy the fruits of Singapore’s delivery on this priority, in an unprecedented way.
Still, by the 1980s, the costs and unintended consequences of massive development were starting to show. The desire to conserve, preserve and make new uses of Singapore’s remaining architectural heritage became more pressing, also because there was less and less left to preserve. Marjorie Doggett’s work, first published before its time, found a new audience 30 years later.
The second edition of* Characters of Light* was one of a number of locally-published books that helped bring to a much wider audience an appreciation of Singapore’s built form, its architectural heritage. Gretchen Liu’s Pastel Portraits, and Lee Kip Lin’s Singapore House, were two such published around the same time. 1986 was also the year the URA announced its first conservation guidelines. They seemed rather tentative to us at the time, but they were just a starting point. The URA was able to build on them in the decades to come, with ever-greater confidence and expertise.
The value of Singapore’s built heritage is obvious now for the way it has helped strengthen and bolster Singapore’s cultural identity. Part of this is a matter of creating a historically-grounded image for visitors to Singapore. (I live in Joo Chiat, and the crowds of young Koreans and Japanese tourists who come to photograph the shophouses on Koon Seng Road is a constant stimulus to the neighbourhood, if sometimes a hazard to navigation.) But much more important I think is the way our built heritage works to connect generations of Singaporeans, through the shared experience of space, sometimes shared through memories, sometimes in the work of the imagination, linking generations past and future.While Doggett’s contribution to her adopted Singapore goes well beyond her role in these three different histories, and any one of these stories would have been enough to persuade NUS Press to work with the Photographic Heritage Foundation on Marjorie’s book.
We’re honoured to play our part.