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.