Why It Is Getting Harder to Photograph Penang - From a Photographer's Perspective

Old signs and buildings with colours. Notice how tight the composition has to be, anything beyond immediately throws the aesthetic off.

Penang is a beautiful place filled with great food, cultural and heritage experiences with a good blend of modernity making it easy to go around, though predominantly heavily relying on cars as the main form of transportation. For first-time shooters or non-photographic visitors with fresh eyes, Penang is actually an ideal environment as it is a very photographically rich location that is easily accessible. George Town being the tourist favourite naturally has just the right amount of elements to keep most people entertained at a surface level as it largely removes the need to think too much to make an image as a matter of fact you don’t really have to hunt for subject matter. This is because going into a new environment, you’re usually more likely to be visually overloaded and usually just go with whatever gives you the strongest first impression. With what George Town has to offer at current stage, you can still easily make an okay image, but it won’t take long to realise—once you give your images a second look—that things start to feel out of place. Trust me, you won’t even need to try that hard to notice it.

Evolving Penang's landscape. Upcoming Andaman Island

As we are now going through a transitional period to modernise the state and improve the infrastructure, unfortunately, it also means we are also stuck in this awkward phase where things simply don’t blend well aesthetically. Picture this: on one hand, we have buildings that are over a century old; on the other, modern and futuristic design cars parked by the roadside, or people dressed in shorts and jerseys. Not to mention the modern LED signage, which comes with a completely different visual language altogether. All these elements add up and increasingly look out of place, highlighting the disparity in time. When combined, it just doesn’t look as aesthetically pleasing as it once did. To make things worse, there is also the ongoing phenomenon surrounding the UNESCO World Heritage Site of George Town, where heritage buildings are painted white—as documented in part 1 of my White Wash project and further detailed in part 2—further affecting the overall aesthetic appeal.

A good blend of elements that are within the aesthetic tolerance. Now picture this image with a Tesla, and you will get where I am heading towards.

Which brings me to the main point of this article: why it is now harder to photograph Penang.

As someone who has invested a considerable amount of time walking and photographing around Penang, this environment increasingly limits what I can produce from a location. I often find myself confined to that one angle that works. This feels very constraining, because the moment I try any other angle, I quickly run into compositional limitations caused by the visual inconsistency that breaks the inherent aesthetic, which immediately pushes me back to the same safe frame. More often than not, it’s because there are elements that simply don’t belong. As of now, it is still possible to shoot here—just starting to get very limited—and with how repetitive things get, it can start to feel boring very quickly.

But this could also just be my personal struggle, as we as photographers tend to go through subject and stylistic shifts in our photographic journey as we explore and experiment new things. And coincidentally at this stage, I find myself preferring cleaner images with a certain aesthetic that accurately reflects the local environment itself. This shift of preference could be contributed from my recent experience of curating for my print store, which requires a much tighter tolerance for higher quality images that feel timeless. Images from this article is carefully selected to represent the essay from my most recent shoot in George Town 2 weeks ago.

For those who are interested in curated fine art style prints, you may visit my print store. You can also write to me if you wish to request any custom prints from my site.