As one of four recipients of the second edition of the Alexander Tutsek Photography Grant, Wei Leng Tay is working on a new project within the theme Stories on Humankind. Her works open up spaces where personal experiences and broader historical contexts intersect, renegotiating questions of belonging, memory, and human experience. In an interview, the artist offered initial insights into her new project and her relationship to the medium of photography.
Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung (ATS): Wei Leng Tay, you are one of the recipients of the current Alexander Tutsek Photography Grant that started in October 2025. How did your interest in photography initially begin?
Wei Leng Tay (WLT): I came to photography in my late teens. When I was doing my undergrad in biology there was one summer where I had to do an internship in Boston. I was in an immunology lab, and did not really like what I was doing there so I told my supervisor. And she said, “Oh well, since you’re in Boston, why don’t you just go out and take photos?” And, so she lent me her camera and that was my introduction to photography. That summer, I took a lot of photos and enjoyed it. I thought: “Maybe I should work at the student newspaper this coming semester.” And that’s what I did.
The following summer I wanted to work in a magazine. I wrote to Asiaweek magazine (a pan-Asian news magazine published between 1975 and 2001) and sent them my portfolio. The photo editor just said: yes, come! That is how my work in photography and my interest in photography started. That summer, I was also assisting photographers, doing photo research, and I learned things like how to use light, and how to compose and it went really well. When I graduated, they offered me a job. That is how it began for me in photography.
ATS: Do you still remember your first camera?
WLT: My first camera was a Nikon FE2 and I still have it. I bought it with the money that I made from my internship in Hong Kong and it came with a very nice lens. When I first started working in journalism, this was in the late 1990s, most things were still analog, right? You would still think about photography in relation to a certain format. And there was always that process of taking pictures, whether it’s with negatives or positives, and then scanning, and laying it out in the magazine. So that’s where I came from. Over the years working in the arts, it has taken me a while to really realize the importance of that period of my photographic career because it really pushed me to think about what photography is, how photography encounters the world, how you look at what’s around you, how you engage with people, how you interview people and things like that.
ATS: You have probably answered this question a few times before in your artistic career, but we still want to ask, what intrigues you most about photography as a medium?
WLT: I think today, or in the last few years or maybe with my practice now, what is important or interesting about photography is that it is such a complex medium and it is a medium that can say one thing but be contradictory at the same time. And if we go back to thinking about documentary photography as a beginning, one can think about the photograph as a document, the photograph as evidence. But as you think of it in that way, doubt can be introduced into how you are looking at this document of an event. Who photographed it? Why did they photograph it? From where did they photograph it? What did they miss out? Is what is absent important in the photograph?
And from there, you can then move to how you experience this photo besides the fact of what you are actually looking at. It is also a question of what the photograph elicits, what emotions, what memories actually influence how you look at the photograph. So, there is that. But then when you hold the photograph, there is a tactility to the object. Is it small? Is it large? Am I flipping? Am I looking at it in a photo album? All of these things make how one would engage with a photograph extremely complicated. And then on top of that comes, how the photograph circulates today. I think for me these things about photography are very exciting because photography is not only one thing. Photography affects so many parts of people’s lives.
ATS: That is an interesting approach and it also leads to our next question. Nowadays everyone is constantly taking photos with their smartphones. How does this affect our relationship to photography as a medium of contemporary art?
WLT: Many people have smartphones, many people will constantly be taking pictures or making images, it becomes something that’s extremely ubiquitous and one could say anybody can be a photographer, which is entirely untrue actually.
I think that with photography becoming so ubiquitous, it actually becomes even more urgent in the field of contemporary art.
A smartphone is fundamentally a tool. It is one of many different tools that one can use to make a photograph. But it is also a tool, that is very specific. It creates these parameters in how you would photograph yourself or the world around you, how you would frame it. Because it is small, it determines the type of composition that you have. The way you share it through social media creates a kind of sociality with the rest of the world. It is a tool that you use to communicate and be a part of this world today. In that sense, I think it is very important for the field of contemporary art, because photography is a way through which one can think about how the world circulates today and what the significance of these different forms of circulation are.
ATS: What are your plans for your project in the framework of the Alexander Tutsek Photography Grant? Can you already tell us something about it?
WLT: With my project I am looking at two parallel family archives – and the gaps and voids within them. There are two ways that I am working on it now. One is that I am using different machines to image the prints and the photographs. For example, I have been working with a microscope in Singapore to think about how one can look at the surface of these things. I also use my phone. So just now when we were talking about the smartphone and contemporary art, I actually have used my smartphone for many projects.
I am using different machines to think about how one can re-image these objects on one level. But I am also looking at albums. I am looking at how albums have been moved, have been reshaped over the years by potentially anonymous hands because we do not know who did what within that family archive. How photographs from different periods are put together with different relationships, what that can mean. And in terms of albums, why some pictures are missing.
I am also considering time because a lot of the older albums were paper albums where people would have corners and they glue them down and over time the glue comes off and all these photos—almost as if they have a life of their own—fall out or they come together, and you start to create a different narrative between the different photographs that you see on the page or you see an overlapping of images that hides parts of the other photographs that are behind them. These different ways of remaking versus ways of reading, are two methods with which I am going forward at the moment. I am thinking about how one can formally represent a void in an archive.
ATS: Thank you very much for sharing your artistic approach and your current perspective on photography.
