The Mentor

Photography, in its own lyrical way, is magic made real. With the click of a shutter, we freeze a moment, fossilise time, and in the process, crystallise the story within that temporal fragment. – Edwin Koo, photographer & educator

Edwin Koo is a father of three energetic kids, an International and award winning documentary photographer, and a photography educator. A practitioner for 14 years, his pedigree in photojournalism entrenched in him, a worldview that “photography can change the world”, one photo at a time.

His achievements as a documentary photographer include the Getty Images Grant for Editorial Photography, the UNICEF Photo of the Year Award, and also the ICON de Martell Cordon Bleu Award. As an author, he is particularly interested in examining the notion of home, identity and displacement, leading him to take on a five-year project titled Paradise, a photo book about the fall of Pakistan’s Swat Valley to terrorism and natural disasters.

Edwin began his photographic career in a Singapore newsroom, where he spent five years honing his craft in the adrenaline-filled world of news photography. In 2008, he left his country in search of his true calling – visual storytelling – and found Kathmandu. He would live in Nepal for the next three years, where he would begin his most important photographic work yet  – uncovering the lives of Tibetan exiles, Maoist rebels, and Swat IDPs.

Now based in Singapore, Edwin continues to pursue his passion, documenting  the upheavals in his homeland’s political landscape in Notes from a Singapore Son. He is also currently working on an ongoing series called TRANSIT, about the Singapore subway.

Internationally, his works have also been exhibited at Breda Photo Festival (Netherlands, 2012); Visa Pour L’Image (France, 2012), Dali International Photo Exhibition (China, 2012), the Angkor Photo Festival (Cambodia, 2011), Photo Quai Festival (France, 2011), and the Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalists (Germany, 2009).

Edwin is the founder of Kathmandu INSIDE OUT, the director of CAPTURED photography collective, and a key opinion leader for SONY RX series in Southeast Asia.