Making sense of the world with truthful pictures

BACK when Edwin Koo chose to pick up a camera and become a professional photographer, his family and relatives could not believe that a university graduate like him would pick what they considered a blue-collar job.迷你倉尖沙咀"I belonged to the privileged class of young people who attended elite schools, and so people thought I would take up something more 'cerebral' or 'financially rewarding' as a career," recalls the graduate of Nanyang Technological University's (NTU) School of Communication Studies (now the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information).But despite the naysayers, he made a name for himself in the competitive industry, and even won the $30,000 ICON de Martell Cordon Bleu award last year as the most outstanding photographer in Singapore.Many in his family thought he would eventually 'grow out of it' and do something else, says the 35-year-old Koo. "In fact, I surprise even myself that I am still a photographer."Along with the cash prize, the award's creator, Pernod Ricard Singapore, sponsored the publication of his first photography monograph comprising two books: Paradise and Visage.His black-and-white monograph will be launched at an invitation-only event at the National Museum of Singapore in early January.Paradise is a 164-page book about man's unending search for paradise, based on recent events surrounding Swat Valley in Pakistan. The project s倉arted in mid-2009 when Koo visited Pakistan after a conflict between the Taleban and Pakistani army forced two million people to flee their hometown in Swat Valley."When I started photographing the people of Swat Valley in exile, many of them lamented that they have lost their paradise. This surprised me, because it is not every day that you meet a people who describe their home as paradise," he says.His second book, Visage, came about after he won the award, and was given a chance to visit Chateau de Chanteloup, the home of Martell in Cognac, France. There, he photographed men and women behind the scenes of cognac-making, like vineyard workers, bottlers and warehouse operators.Though the second book is entirely unrelated to the first, Koo packaged them together because both were created with the same purpose: to make sense of the world we live in."In Swat, I tried to understand paradise from photographing the people and places. In Cognac, I tried to understand the story of Martell through photography too . . . The whole point of photography is that people should be able to relate to the images you create. So that's what I try to do with my photography: to be honest and sincere, so that it resonates with the audience," he says.Paradise and Visage come as a set, priced at $60. They are available at Select Books at 51 Armenian Street, and online at .selectbooks.com.sgmini storage