Labouring

Five-Foot Way, Five Decades Later

I remember this scene clearly.

The five-foot way—narrow, shaded, functional—was never meant for comfort. It was a corridor of survival. Shophouses rose above, paint peeling, drains running shallow along the edge. Light entered from the side in hard diagonals, carving shadows across cracked cement. There she was, bent forward, ageing spine curved like a question mark history never answered.

Her dressing was simple. Worn blouse clinging to a back shaped by decades of repetition. Shorts loose at the knees. No theatrics, no ornament. Beside her, a woven bamboo basket, a metal bucket, paper sheets laid out on the ground. She was picking, sorting, washing—perhaps vegetables, perhaps dried goods—her fingers working with mechanical patience. Labour without applause.

The five-foot way was architecture of necessity. Designed under colonial building regulations to provide shelter from sun and rain, it became an extension of domestic and commercial life. Commerce spilled outward. Labour moved into the public threshold. There was no clear boundary between private endurance and public visibility.

I imagine growing old in such a posture. Knees folded against unforgiving cement. Hands submerged in cloudy water. Sweat forming silently under morning humidity. No ergonomic consideration. No air-conditioning. Only persistence.

And I know—deep in my bones—I preferred roaming the streets with my camera.

Not because I disrespected labour, but because my labour was different. I worked with light, with time, with anticipation. I laboured over exposure, over framing, over timing. I chose to make the fleeting permanent. While she sorted produce, I sorted moments. While she washed and prepared, I composed and preserved.

I cannot romanticise the past Chinatown.

It was not a sepia postcard. It was demanding. It smelled of dampness, of old drains, of raw produce and accumulated fatigue. The soles of my feet darkened. The air pressed heavy against skin. The old grew older in public view, without retirement plans or ergonomic chairs. There was dignity, yes—but dignity is not comfort.

Does it make me cry now, looking at this image?

Not exactly.

It makes me reflect.

There is temptation to mourn a “simpler time,” but simplicity is often a word spoken by those who did not bear the weight of it. Would I want to be that woman? To age within that narrow corridor, fingers perpetually immersed in water, back bent toward the ground? No. I honour her endurance. I do not envy her condition.

Freud might say such images stir latent anxieties about ageing, dependency, the body’s eventual decline. Jung might frame her as the archetype of the Earth Mother in her labouring aspect—grounded, repetitive, sustaining community quietly. But psychologically, perhaps what I confronted most was my own trajectory. I was young then. Energetic. Choosing movement over rootedness. She embodied time accumulating in the body. I embodied time chasing itself through a lens.

One of the admirable traits of Singaporeans is indeed this: we are hardworking. Not in slogan form, but in muscle memory. In the way the elderly continue to labour. In the way hawkers wake before sunrise. In the way students compete relentlessly. In the way a young photographer spends nights in a darkroom refining prints for salon competitions.

Hard work is not glamorous. It is repetitive. It is often invisible. It bends backs before it builds skylines.

When I roamed those streets, I was not escaping labour—I was redefining it. I sought to wrestle time into permanence. I wanted the future to see what the present overlooked. I wanted these five-foot ways, these worn blouses, these metal buckets and woven baskets to survive demolition, regulation, modernisation.

The image does not ask for tears.

It asks for honesty.

The five-foot way was a threshold—between inside and outside, past and future, youth and age. She occupied it physically. I occupied it temporally.

She laboured with her hands.

I laboured with light.

And in that quiet convergence, Chinatown became eternal—not romantic, not tragic—simply true.

Steam and Blood

Steam, Blood, and Silver Halide — Chinatown at First Light

Morning in early-Eighties Chinatown did not begin with birdsong. It began with steam.

The sun had barely cleared the shophouse roofs when the market was already alive—metal clanging, water sloshing, voices bargaining in Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew. The ground, uneven and broken, held yesterday’s residue. By mid-morning the soles of my feet would darken to an almost charcoal hue, as if the street itself had marked me as witness.

And there he stood—my heroic man. Cigarette at his mouth, posture erect, one arm lifted, presenting the lifeless chicken above a vast metal drum. Steam rose in thick white plumes. Sunlight pierced through it, fusing heat and illumination into a theatre of labour. The feathers caught light like sparks. In that instant, he was both executioner and provider, a modern Chinese man forged in post-colonial Singapore—disciplined, unsentimental, bodily present. There was nothing theatrical in his gesture; yet through my lens he became monumental.

If I borrow from Freud, I might say I was witnessing civilisation’s thin membrane stretched over primal instinct. The ritual of slaughter externalised what society prefers to conceal: death sustains life. The market permitted what the supermarket now hides. Jung would perhaps say I was seeing an archetype—the Provider—one who mediates between nature and the tribe. He stood in smoke like a mythic figure emerging from alchemical vapour. The rising steam felt like transformation—feather to flesh, life to nourishment, chaos to order.

But what of me, the photographer?

I woke early. Discipline shaped my craft. Film was loaded carefully in dim light. No second chances. One shot had to count. I was not merely documenting; I was participating in my own rite of passage. To photograph death at dawn is to confront impermanence before breakfast. It steadied my nerves. It sharpened my seeing.

The process unfolded methodically. Wire cages stacked higher than a man contained nervous, breathing potential. Patrons would choose their bird, pointing decisively. Selection was intimate—eye contact with fate. Once chosen, the legs were bound. The butcher’s left hand gripped both legs and head, steady and firm. Feathers were plucked near the throat to expose a pale corridor of skin. With the right hand, he drew the knife across in a precise slit. A bowl waited beneath, collecting the blood as the bird struggled in suffocating reflex. The hand did not waver. The body tilted so gravity could complete the work.

Then into the self-made barrel—a spinning contraption that stripped feathers through centrifugal insistence. A few minutes later the chicken emerged naked, transformed. Another helper would chop it into portions fit for the family table. It was choreography, repeated daily. Common then. Invisible now.

Today, the abattoir hides behind regulation and sterile walls. Chickens appear featherless, anonymous, divorced from origin. A child might see a jungle fowl in a park and insist it is something entirely different, because the supermarket version bears no resemblance to the living creature. Books classify. Experience reveals. Knowledge without witness breeds detachment.

I witnessed.

Around that time, my father, after receiving his gratuity and sharing his joy, he gave me a thousand dollars, no small sum then. I upgraded to the Nikon FE. A thousand dollars—The Nikon FE, introduced in 1978, was a beautiful refinement of Japanese engineering: electronically controlled shutter, aperture-priority automation, yet still capable of mechanical operation at 1/90th of a second should the battery fail. Solid brass top plate. Accurate metering. A bridge between mechanical tradition and electronic future. It felt like a declaration of seriousness.

Before that, I had used the Mamiya NC1000S—a robust SLR from the late 1970s offering shutter-priority automation in a compact body. It served me faithfully. But as competition intensified, I knew I had to elevate. Tools are not vanity. They are extensions of intent.

I began to win—first a few competitions, then more. Print quality became paramount. Grain control, tonal separation, shadow detail—all scrutinised under judging lights. I studied magazines in the library—British Journal of Photography, Popular Photography, Japanese annuals. I analysed how masters composed, how they controlled contrast curves, how they rendered texture without losing dignity.

The darkroom became my sanctuary. Red safelight. The scent of developer, stop bath, fixer. Watching an image rise slowly on fibre paper was alchemy. Silver halide crystals responding to photons I had captured at dawn. The brutality of the market transformed into tonal poetry. Outside, chaos. Inside, control. The darkroom was not escape—it was refinement.

Singapore in the early Eighties was transforming rapidly. Urban renewal reshaped Chinatown. Hygiene campaigns and infrastructure modernised the old quarters. Yet photography thrived amid transition. At Raffles Institution, the Photographic Society nurtured ambition. We debated composition, experimented with push-processing, exchanged contact sheets. The Singapore Salon competitions were serious arenas—monochrome mastery, pictorial trends blending Western formalism with Asian subject matter.

Street photography carried existential urgency. We sensed the old quarters were vanishing. Document now, or lose forever. That pressure sharpened me. Competition was not merely about prizes; it was about witnessing a disappearing texture of life.

Persistence became my creed. “Ask, and you shall be given.” I held on to that Biblical cadence—not as superstition, but as discipline. Ask for improvement, and labour for it. Ask for clarity, and rise before sunrise. Ask for excellence, and endure critique. The rewards came—not by accident, but by repetition.

The image of the man with the cigarette is therefore not only about slaughter. It mirrors my own initiation. His firm grip parallels my tightening control over craft. The steam rising in sunlight is like the image emerging in the developer tray. Heat outside; chemical warmth inside. Transformation in both arenas.

There is no need to romanticise. Nor to sanitise.

The chicken died at dawn.

And I, in that same light, was becoming a photographer.

Silver Blades

Black Soles, Silver Blades — Chinatown, Early Eighties

There are cities that remember themselves honestly, and there are cities that remember only what flatters them. The early 1980s in Singapore stood somewhere in between—caught in the tremor between kampung residue and modern ambition, between drainage ditches and rising towers, between raw blood on asphalt and the polished marble of what was to come.

I walked those streets of Chinatown with a camera slung across my shoulder, not yet the polished photographer of four decades, but a restless young man searching for form within chaos. The wet market was not a metaphor. It was wet. The ground was broken, pockmarked with shallow craters that gathered water thickened by scales, feathers, vegetable peel, and diluted blood. The pot-holes became small, trembling ponds of commerce. Fish guts, chicken feathers, discarded leaves—everything flowed toward the lowest point. Gravity was the true municipal planner of the old market.

You would smell it before you saw it. Not the nostalgic “earthy” scent that modern cafés try to recreate with clever branding—but the blunt reality of life ending so that life may continue. Fish were dispatched on round wooden chopping blocks darkened by years of impact. Chickens were culled, their bodies still twitching in reflex. Pork, beef, and mutton hung in open air, their surfaces glistening under humid light. There was no insulation from process. Consumption and death were not separated by stainless steel and glass panels. They happened in full view.

The man in your photograph sits low, grounded, hat pulled forward, cleaver rising and falling in rhythm. Around him buckets, basins, scrap wood, stacked crates—an orchestration of necessity. His boots press into dampness. His legs open, steady, practical. No theatre. No romance. Only work. The arc of the blade is final and efficient. A market is not a museum; it is an organism.

Returning home after those mornings was an act of reckoning. Sweat mingled with the metallic scent of blood. The soles of my feet—almost black from street residue—testified to terrain. The camera strap cut into skin. The stomach had to be disciplined. The olfactory senses assaulted. Yet the eye—ah, the eye—was alive.

Occasionally a splash would descend from above—water flung from stalls by sellers, often elderly women, territorial guardians of their small economies. They suspected me to be Japanese. The camera made me foreign in their eyes. Perhaps it was the intensity. Perhaps the posture. The lens felt like intrusion. So I learned distance. A zoom lens allowed me to stay beyond the splash zone, to frame without immediate confrontation. Safety has its advantages.

And yet, I was never fully satisfied with distance.

There is a certain intoxication in proximity. The Tokina 20mm—how that lens seduced me. Wide, immersive, almost confrontational. With 20mm you do not observe; you enter. You bend slightly, lean into the scene, let the periphery distort just enough to suggest motion. Tokina, the Japanese lens manufacturer founded in 1950 under the name Tokyo Optical Equipment Manufacturing, earned its reputation among working photographers for robust construction and characterful rendering. In the late 70s and early 80s, their wide-angle primes became beloved companions for those who wanted grit rather than clinical perfection. They were not shy lenses. They pulled the world toward you.

With the 20mm mounted, I had to step closer—sometimes uncomfortably so. The cleaver would flash within arm’s reach. Fish scales might strike the front element. Humidity would fog the glass. The peril of a wet camera was real: moisture creeping into mechanical joints, fungus waiting to bloom in tropical darkness, shutter curtains vulnerable to grit. One careless splash and the day’s work might dissolve into corrosion.

But the dynamism—oh, the dynamism. The 20mm stretched the chopping block into an arena. It exaggerated the curvature of buckets, the tilt of wooden crates, the spread of legs bracing against the slippery floor. It allowed the viewer to feel the closeness of flesh, metal, water, and human labour compressed into a few square metres. It was not romantic. It was alive.

Today, when people speak of “the good old Chinatown,” they often mean the aesthetic residue—the lanterns, the shophouses, the sepia tint of memory. They do not speak of clogged drains, nor of the stinging eyes from evaporating brine, nor of the way sweat would trace lines through market dust on your forearms. Memory edits. Repetition sanctifies. Say something often enough and it becomes heritage.

But truth resides in texture.

The early Eighties were transitional. Urban renewal was underway. Concrete was replacing timber. Regulation would soon standardise what was once improvised. Hygiene campaigns, infrastructure upgrades, hawker centre consolidation—all necessary, all inevitable. A society cannot remain perpetually in the raw state of its beginnings. Cleanliness is not betrayal; it is evolution.

And yet, what you captured is not merely decay—it is intensity. A civilisation negotiating survival at street level. There was dignity in the fishmonger’s posture. There was resilience in the women guarding their stalls. There was vitality in the chorus of bargaining voices. Even the rain of thrown water carried a fierce assertion of territory.

You were not collecting nostalgia. You were witnessing metabolism.

Perhaps that is the deeper lesson. We are tempted to mourn what is gone, but we rarely remember the discomfort that accompanied it. The blackened soles, the soaked shirt, the threat to expensive glass and metal. Growth sanitises surfaces but does not necessarily erase spirit. It transforms it.

And you, young photographer navigating suspicion and splash, were already practising something profound: to look without sentimentality, to stand in discomfort, to move closer when safe distance feels too easy. That instinct has carried you across four decades, from wet markets to kelongs, from Hasselblad to AI-assisted imaging.

The past is not an aroma to be inhaled wistfully. It is a texture to be understood.

You did not romanticise it then. Do not let others romanticise it now.

And perhaps that is why the image endures.