She moved to London to become British museum Tate’s first Singaporean curator of photography

It has been five months since Charmaine Toh moved from Singapore to London to start her new job and new life. She is the first Singaporean to be appointed senior curator of International Art (Photography) at Tate and yes, she does miss the food back home.

“It’s not that the food here is bad,” she told CNA Women over a call on Google Meet. “It’s just that I haven’t overcome that psychological barrier to convince myself to pay £16 (S$27.50) for a bowl of noodles.

“My friend Sookoon (Ang), a Singaporean artist based in Paris, told me that ‘One day, you will spend that £16, and when you do, that’s when you know you’ve arrived’,” she laughed.

Toh is in charge of developing Tate’s photography collection, as well as curating exhibitions at its family of four prestigious museums in the United Kingdom that houses the country’s stock of national art alongside international modern and contemporary art.

Her debut exhibition, Global Pictorialism, will open at Tate Modern in London on Dec 4, 2025 and run until May 25, 2026.

“Photography is exciting because it occupies such a central role in art and everyday life,” Toh said. “It’s quite a democratic medium. Most people have access to photography – whether to take photos or [show it on] social media. And it’s become such an important way in which we engage with the world.”

To be clear, Toh, who declined to reveal her age, isn’t trained in photography, nor does she dabble in the art form. She’s an art historian by trade, having received her PhD in art history from the University of Melbourne in Australia. It’s just that her focus has always skewed towards the visual art form; she was programme director at Objectifs – Centre for Photography & Film from 2010 to 2014. “What’s interesting about photography is the way it extends outside the art world,” she said.

Prior to relocating to the UK, Toh was senior curator at the National Gallery Singapore (NGS), where she curated major photography exhibitions like Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia (2022) and Chua Soo Bin: Truths and Legends (2019). The latter paid homage to the 92-year-old fine-art lensman and Cultural Medallion recipient.

In 2023, she also published a book, Imagining Singapore: Pictorial Photography from the 1950s to the 1970s.

It was her expertise in Southeast Asian art that led to her appointment at Tate. Despite the institution’s great age – it was established in 1897 – it only started to build its photography collection around 15 years ago, and is now expanding the collection rapidly.

The biggest difference between working at Tate and NGS, said Toh, is the scale. “The kind of artwork I have access to, and the kind of programmes and exhibitions I can curate, it’s expanded a lot, which is why I took the job.”

Curation, if nothing else, is storytelling. And having woven multiple narratives of Singapore and Southeast Asia back home, Toh felt the need to tell a bigger story. “This kind of international collection allows me to really challenge the history of photography and the history of art, which I couldn’t really do in Singapore.”

The move to Tate was therefore a “very natural step”.

A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

Toh’s first exercise in this regard, Global Pictorialism, is slowly taking shape. Pictorialism is an international style of photography and aesthetic movement that was popular in Europe and North America from around the 1880s to the 1940s. Major pictorialist photographers included Henry Peach Robinson, Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen.

Rather than using the camera to record reality, pictorialists focused on creating atmospheric images to evoke emotional responses, using various techniques to do so. Photographs of this style tended to have soft focus, painterly effects and were printed in browns or blues rather than stark black and white.

In the West, pictorialism gradually gave way to a newer style: Modernist photography. But Toh contends that outside of Western canon, the art form has existed much longer. “In Singapore, for example, the height of pictorialism was the 1950s. What I’m trying to do in this exhibition is bring all that back into the narrative,” she said.

And she’s not stopping there. “In a sense, I’m trying to revise this photo history by expanding our understanding of pictorialism and bringing in works not just from Singapore, [but also works from] China, Brazil, South Africa and so on.” She estimates that there will be around 250 photos in all.

By juxtaposing works from masters like Stieglitz and Steichen alongside works from “unknown” photographers from Singapore or China, the message is that both famous names and unsung heroes contributed to the development of photography. “That’s what I’m interested in doing at Tate right now,” Toh said.

THE SINGAPORE CONNECTION

After World War II, photographers in Singapore began banding together in camera clubs, creating a support network that allowed them to further their pursuit of pictorialism. These photos, explained Toh, were treated like fine art, and made to sell or be exhibited – unlike studio photos, which were commissioned by clients.

Many of these artists were amateur photographers, such as Lim Kwong Ling and Cultural Medallion winner Foo Tee Jun, who had day jobs. Objectifs is currently exhibiting Foo Tee Jun: Time and Tide, until Jul 28.

“These guys were active in the 1950s and 1960s, and not just in Singapore. They were exhibiting around the world because their works were good enough to be exhibited around the world,” Toh said.

“When I was working for NGS, I helped to acquire a lot of their works for the collection. That’s when I started talking to them and realised how urgent the process was, because they’re fairly elderly.

“That generation is now in their eighties and nineties. Some have already passed on… the family might not have kept the works. So things are lost. We were at that point in the nation’s history where there was a bit of urgency to get those works into the NGS collection.”

A DAY IN HER LIFE AT TATE

Toh is currently assembling the works to be exhibited in her debut show and can’t confirm which Singaporean photographers will be represented yet.

The 18-month process (from now until December 2025) is fast by curatorial standards, she told CNA Women, considering the scale of the exhibition – an international showcase with 250 works. By comparison, her last exhibition at NGS, Living Pictures, which showcased 300 works, took five years to put together.

Much of her time will be spent researching the works and coordinating overseas loans. Then she will need to put on her conservator cap to assess the quality and condition of the works. Finally, she and her team have to produce the exhibition catalogue, which gets complicated because there are image rights that need to be cleared.

“My role straddles both exhibition-making and collection-building,” Toh said. “We’re always working on changing the displays. That’s an ongoing part of the job. The rest of my time is spent researching how we might build our photography collection, which includes Southeast Asian as well as international photographers.”

As part of her day-to-day work, Toh tries to keep up with developments in the generative AI space and assess its impact on the creative arts. “A lot of artists and photographers are now thinking about generative AI and the kind of role it plays. I guess I’m less concerned about the falsity of the images than how photography is evolving and understanding that. And I’m also paying attention to whether works made in that vein might fit within our collection.

“Photography for me is less and less an image on a wall. It’s really a way that we’re engaging and understanding the world. It’s a tool for mediation, whether it’s in a traditional documentary sense – like press photography – or an AI-constructed image. They’re both ways of mediating the world, but they’re saying different things.”

For someone in such a visually stimulating vocation, Toh’s own Instagram page is surprisingly sparse. She has posted a grand total of eight pictures since 2016. “I’m very conscious about electronic waste. It’s a very weird thing, but studying and working with [photography], there’s just so much detritus around. I don’t want to add more photos to the world.”