Darren Soh
WORKS EXHIBITIONS CV
Born and based in Singapore, Darren Soh (b. 1976, Singapore) obtained an honours degree in Sociology from the National University of Singapore in 2001 while serving as a contract photographer at the The Straits Times, Singapore’s leading English broadsheet newspaper. His personal work focuses on the change and destruction of his home country of Singapore, where urban growth and redevelopment is rapidly transforming the island nation.
Soh’s first monograph While You Were Sleeping, a collection of nocturnal landscapes from Singapore was published in 2004. Subsequently, the Esplanade Singapore presented images from the book as an exhibition. In 2009, Soh contributed to Resonance: Songs of Our Forefathers, an architectural photography tome documenting the National Monuments of Singapore. His work from the Singapore General Elections 2011 was also shown at the prestigious Noorderlicht Photo Festival in The Netherlands in the same year.
Soh has been placed in several international photography awards including the Commonwealth Photographic Awards, the Prix de la Photographie, Paris and the International Photography Awards. In 2019, Soh was named as one of ten global winners in Apple's inaugural Shot On iPhone Challenge. His work was shortlisted for the prestigious Arcaid Images Architectural Photography Awards in 2014. He was awarded the Discernment Award at the 2013 ICON de Martell Cordon Bleu Photography Award. In 2009, Soh was also listed by New York’s Photo District News Magazine (PDN) as one of 30 Emerging Photographers to watch.
Soh’s work on the last KTM trains to run in Singapore, SS24 The Last Train, was presented at the 4th Singapore International Photography Festival (2014), Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (2013) and Hong Kong Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (2012). In conjunction with the Singapore Tourism Board, his photographic work on Public Housing in Singapore was showcased internationally at the Singapore Pavilion of the EXPO Astana, Kazakhstan and the St+Art Urban Art Festival, Mumbai, India in 2017.
In 2018, his works from Platform.SG's Twentyfifteen.SG project was shown at the Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey, as part of the Singapore Unseen exhibition, the largest and most comprehensive collection of photographic work from Singapore to be shown outside of the country. In the same year, he presented his decade-long documentation work of threatened and demolished modern and vernacular architecture from Singapore in a new monograph, exhibition and video documentary all titled Before It All Goes – Architecture from Singapore's Early Independence Years, which was nominated and shortlisted for the prestigious President*s Design Award in 2020.
Soh’s work is in the collection of the National Museum of Singapore, Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore, as well as numerous corporate and private collections from around the world. His large-scale photographic collages from the Singapore General Elections 2011 also became part of the National Gallery Singapore’s collection in 2022 and two pieces were subsequently shown at Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia, the first exhibition on photography of this scale and scope ever assembled.
In 2010, together with other photographers, Soh founded Platform.SG, an initiative to showcase documentary photography of Singapore. With the launch of the Singapore chapter of DOCOMOMO, Darren became a founding member in 2021.
Soh’s work documenting vernacular and threatened modern buildings in Singapore continues. His latest project aims to bring together a historical survey of public housing blocks built since the HDB's founding in 1960 through photography.