From a rare archive of 2,800 photographs taken by Tan Pin Pin in the early 1990s to 25 years of Singaporean photographic practice, SIPF2026 invites audiences to look at the city, and themselves, differently.

What did Singapore look like before the smartphone, before social media and before almost every moment of daily life could be photographed and instantly shared? One answer can be found in a remarkable archive of 2,800 black-and-white photographs taken by filmmaker and artist Tan Pin Pin in 1991 and 1992. Some capture weddings and funerals. Others show school excursions, religious gatherings, society balls, matchmaking outings, bus stops, void decks and neighbourhood celebrations. Together, they form an intimate portrait of a Singapore that was still becoming itself.

Whenever they were taken, those photographs will now return to public view as part of the 10th Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF), which runs from 16 October 2026 to 31 January 2027. Under the theme “In My End Is My Beginning”, the landmark 10th edition marks 18 years of SIPF with a major focus on Singaporean photography, alongside international exhibitions, emerging artists, photobooks, talks, masterclasses and workshops. Rather than simply looking backwards, however, this year’s festival asks what happens when we return to images, and discover that they have changed because we have.

The most evocative starting point may be Singapore Index, a solo exhibition of 63 photographs by Tan Pin Pin at Shop-House by DECK. At just 22, after returning to Singapore following time abroad, Tan spent 12 months systematically photographing the rituals and gatherings that made up everyday life here.

Using a wide-angle lens and direct flash, she created 2,800 black-and-white negatives; an enormous personal index of a city in transition. The photographs are raw and observational rather than polished or sentimental. There are religious gatherings, weddings and funerals alongside school reunions, funfairs, society balls and matchmaking outings. They capture people in the middle of living rather than posing for posterity.

Viewed 36 years later, the series offers something more complicated than nostalgia. It reveals the observational eye that would go on to shape Tan’s acclaimed documentary work, including Singapore GaGa, 80km/h and In Time to Come.

“I call this series Singapore Index because I was systematically documenting Singapore through her events and rituals. I went all over the country to funerals, weddings, school excursions, the void deck… I had been a school girl when I left, and came back as a young adult, and I wanted to be in those spaces to see what Singapore was like for myself.”

That desire to see Singapore “for myself” feels particularly resonant today, when the city is photographed constantly but perhaps not always observed closely. Singapore Index runs from 16 October 2026 to 31 January 2027, making it one of the festival’s exhibitions that continues into Singapore Art Week 2027.

The festival’s major anchor exhibition, Shifting Images: Photography from Singapore (2000–2025), takes a much wider view. Featuring 47 artists, the multi-venue survey traces 25 years of Singaporean photographic culture, but deliberately avoids presenting it as a straightforward chronological history. Instead, the exhibition unfolds across seven interconnected thematic exhibitions, each examining different ways photographs are made, circulated, remembered and interpreted.

At Mizuma Gallery, Image After Image: Photography examined through its own conditions of making considers the transition from analogue prints and screen data to generative AI systems. At ShanghART Gallery, Systems of Seeing – Where Images Gather looks at how individual photographs can form collective networks, urban inventories and systems of knowledge. After the Archive at Figment Club House turns a critical eye towards colonial records, classification systems and historical omissions. At Geylang East Library and STORIES Joo Chiat, a Hotel by Cove, The Stories We Carry explores photography through memory, examining both the conditions under which images are created and the ways they become systems for organising knowledge.

States of Becoming at SingPost Geylang Post Office uses portraiture and performance to explore gender, intimacy and belonging, while In Circles: Photography, Fiction and Ways of Knowing explores photography as a space for speculation, imagination and circulation. And at Guoco Midtown, Where We Stand considers rapid urbanisation, nightscapes and Singapore’s built environment. All this comes together to showcase a photographic map of Singapore, one that asks audiences to move through different spaces and ways of seeing.

SIPF2026 also looks at what happens when photography leaves the gallery wall. The 10th SIPF Open Call Portfolio Showcase features 20 portfolios from 16 countries, selected from international submissions and evaluated by a jury comprising leading curators, researchers and directors. Among the jury members are Monica Allende, Independent Creative Director & Curator from the United Kingdom; He Yining, Independent Researcher & Curator from China; Miyuki Endo, Senior Curator at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; Goh Sze Ying, Curator at National Gallery Singapore; and SIPF Co-Founder and Director Gwen Lee.

The 10th SIPF Open Call Photobook Showcase takes a different approach to storytelling, presenting 41 shortlisted entries from 188 applications across more than 37 countries. Here, photography becomes something you hold rather than simply look at. Photobooks bring together paper, sequencing, imagery and physical texture to create narratives that unfold slowly, page by page, an especially tactile experience at a time when so much visual culture exists on screens.

Since 2008, SIPF’s Open Call Portfolio Showcase and Open Call Photobook Showcase have presented more than 700 projects from 56 countries, connecting emerging and established image-makers across cultures and geographies.

One of the pleasures of SIPF is that it doesn’t confine photography to a single arts district. The 2026 festival spreads across galleries, public spaces, libraries, a post office, a hotel and other locations around the city.

Alongside the main exhibitions, audiences can discover the 10th Singapore Young Photographer Showcase, Echoes of Home at *SCAPE Whitespace, featuring works by junior and youth photographers. There is also The worlds we traverse, the worlds that linger at Yeo Workshop, featuring Chen Jialu, Geraldine Kang, Lavender Chang, Michael Lee and Wei Leng Tay, curated by Lenette Lua.

Meanwhile, selected Open Call portfolios will be shown at the Esplanade Tunnel, bringing international photographic practices into one of Singapore’s busiest arts destinations. It is a fitting format for a festival interested in the idea that photographs are never completely isolated objects. They exist in places, communities and conversations.

For photographers and anyone interested in how images are changing, SIPF2026 also ventures into one of the biggest questions facing visual culture today: what happens to photography in the age of generative AI? On 14 October, award-winning lens-based artist and AI expert Boris Eldagsen will deliver the keynote RIVALS – Photography vs. Promptography at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts.

Rather than framing AI simply as a replacement for photography, the session examines how the two media construct meaning differently and considers their respective strengths, limitations and responsibilities.

Eldagsen will return on 16 October for a four-hour masterclass, Visual Direction Through Language – Image Editing with Generative AI, exploring advanced generative AI and prompt editing for photographers, designers, illustrators, art directors and artists working in image-making and post-production.

The programme continues with workshops and conversations led by international practitioners including Monica Allende and Shi Zhen, as well as Singapore-based speakers examining representation, image equity, memory and Southeast Asian visual culture.

The theme “In My End Is My Beginning”, drawn from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, is a fitting one for a festival reaching its 10th edition. Photography is fundamentally about looking back, but every return to an image can produce a different reading.

Gwen Lee, Artistic Director and Co-Founder of SIPF, says: “Every photograph is both an arrival and a departure; every exhibition is both a reflection and an invitation. As SIPF enters its second decade, “In My End Is My Beginning” is less a statement of closure than an affirmation that every ending carries within it the possibility of another beginning. Photography remains a practice of continual return, acquiring new meanings with every encounter and every generation that comes back to look.”

That idea runs through the programme, considering how Tan Pin Pin’s photographs of early-1990s Singapore are no longer simply records of the past. They become evidence of how much the city has changed, and reminders of what remains. Meanwhile, the 25-year survey reveals photography constantly adapting alongside technology, society and identity, and the international showcases demonstrate that photographers around the world are asking many of the same questions in radically different places. Finally, the photobooks offer a reminder that, even in an era of endless scrolling, there is still something powerful about slowing down and turning a page.

The most compelling thing about SIPF2026 may be that it isn’t really asking audiences to decide whether photography belongs to the past or the future. It is asking us to look at both. There is the Singapore captured by a young Tan Pin Pin in the early 1990s, when weddings, funerals, school outings and neighbourhood rituals became fragments of a rapidly changing city.

There is the Singapore documented by artists over the past 25 years, a place shaped by redevelopment, technology, identity, memory and shifting ideas of belonging. And then there is the Singapore still being photographed now, through new technologies, new perspectives and a new generation of image-makers. Eighteen years and ten editions into its story, SIPF returns to the beginning by doing what photography has always done best: asking us to look again.

Featured Image: Tan Pin Pin, Singapore Index (School Funfair), 1992. Courtesy of the artist and DECK Photography Art Centre.

10th Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF2026) runs from 16th October 2026 to 31st January 2027. More information available here

The SIPF2026 Festival Pass costs $50, or $40 for concession holders, including NSFs, School Pass holders, PAssion Silver Concession Card holders and Merdeka Generation Card holders. The pass includes unlimited repeat visits to exhibitions, unlimited complimentary guided exhibition walkthroughs from 16 October 2026 to 31 January 2027, 30 per cent off the Asia Meet Symposium Pass, and 10 per cent off selected SIPF seminars, photo walks, artist talks and merchandise.

Individual exhibition entry is free at most venues. Exceptions include Singapore Index at Shop-House by DECK, as well as States of Becoming and In Circles: Photography, Fiction and Ways of Knowing at SingPost Geylang Post Office, which cost $20, or $15 per venue. Festival Pass holders, children aged 12 and below, and seniors aged 60 and above enjoy free entry to these paid exhibitions, subject to verification.