The first series of photographs Charmaine Toh sought to acquire for the Tate collection after having started working as a new photography curator last year was a series produced during the Vietnam War. The museum is already working important on the conflict. The photograph of Don McCullin in 1968 of an American navy waiting in the house of a civilian, looking impatiently by the window, was the poster of the retrospective of the 2019 museum on the war photographer. But Toh wanted the newly acquired works, produced by the Vietnamese photographer Võ a Khánh in the 1960s and 1970s, tell a different story.
One of the images shows a group of nurses under a refuge in the U Minh forest of South Vietnam. Up to the knees in the water, they wait for a patient on a stretcher. Another children's watch in a makeshift outdoor class while holding their black paintings. “We are so used to seeing war photographs, often action plans or soldiers,” explains Toh, sitting in the spacious local office usually occupied by the director of Tate, Maria Balshaw (she is absent) on Southbank of London. “But when you look at the Vietnamese photos of war, it is daily life. It is not the launch of grenades. So, suddenly, this definition of war photography has returned, because it means war for people?”
Khánh's photography is important in itself, says toh, but by bringing this work to a museum like Tate, it takes a new meaning, contesting certain stories anchored in the collection. “What possibilities could they then have to read Don McCullen's photographs in a different way?” she said.
Toh is considering such questions since she assumed her role in The Tate, one of the most coveted in photography, a little over a year ago. The conservative of international photography is the figurehead of the Tate photographic collection, responsible for building it by acquisitions and conservation exhibitions and free exhibitions in its four museums in London, Liverpool and St Ives. It is a heavy role in British art. “You are, in a very real sense, to build a cannon,” says Toh about warning in a museum. “We don't really want to use this word, but you are.” And an important thing, because the museum tries to fight against a pandemic financing deficit and a drop of more than 20% of visitors compared to the fore-201.
The attraction of the role of Toh, who moved from his native Singapore for work, was to be able to defend one of the great tate forces. “The tate has always had a very international orientation and they have always been very interested in transnational stories,” she says. Toh's desire to show “extended stories”, which, “at the time, was called the history of global art” is, as she sees, “why they hired me at this stage”.
Sculpt the mass of photographic history In a curved story for the general public is a familiar task for Toh, which arrived at the tate after an eight -year spell as a curator at the National Gallery Singapore. But London is new. Toh was born in Singapore and studied the economy as the first cycle, “largely because Asian parents expect their children to enter something that is useful,” she said with a smile. However, she used all her additional credits by studying art history, having liked practical art courses at school.
She continued to do a doctorate in art history, before moving on to the conservation of photography in a contemporary art center and, finally, to the main art museum in Singapore, where she began to take an interest in modern and historical photography. The region was exciting, she said, because there was a real emergency in Singapore. Without a market for art photography and a tropical climate which literally melted from “bricks” photographs, families threw work as practitioners died. She therefore started the task of meeting artists and cataloging their work. The result was a rented exhibition entitled Living images: photography in Southeast Asia In 2022, the first study in the history of photography throughout the region.
In London, Toh is amazed at the cost of a single tube course and lacks the abundance of Singapore food which is both good and inexpensive (“I have not overcome this psychological barrier to convince me to pay £ 16 for a bowl of noodles,” she said in an interview after obtaining work). But, although the big institutions are familiar for her, she found British museums, with their Rothkos and Turner sketches freely accessible, “Amazing”. And the tate is in particular. Sometimes, at the end of a particularly long day, she descends into the Giacometti rooms in the basement of the tate “to relax”. “It's dark,” she said happily. “So soothing.”
Toh is only the third conservative of the Tate photography. The position was inaugurated in 2009 by Simon Baker, who organized blockbusters such as The radical eyeImpressions of the collection of Elton John of modernist photography from the 1920s to the 1950s. Baker was succeeded in 2018 by the art historian born in Osaka, Yasafumi Nakamori, who supervised an exhibition by the South African photographer Zanele Muholi, who went to six European museums, and a recent show focused on British photography in the 1980s. Director of Tate Modern and Chief Tate Programs, says that Toh has been hired for his experience in the manufacture of exhibitions for a large audience as well as her perspective shaped by the knowledge of art and photography of the East and Southeast.
All of this seems rather serious, but Toh's first intervention in the gallery is deliciously fun. The free display combines the phone with lobster of Salvador Dalí, a favorite of the Tate public, with a series of photographs of strange animal and plant species by contemporary Singaporean photographer Robert Zhao Renhu. One shows an artificially dyed aquarium fish in a particularly sought -after shade of “Mekong Deep Blue”, another square apple sold in a department store in South Korea. Some subjects are real and others are inventions of the artist. “It is a museum open to these unusual pairs,” explains Toh. “How can we rethink the phone in lobster in the post-truth era today and how can you look at the contemporary and speculative fiction of Robert Zhao Renhu with regard to surrealism?”
A more recent piece contains an exhibition by the Czech photographer from the 20th century Josef Koudelka. Toh wanted a “clean and classic suspension” of work taken from his three signature projects: “invasion”, made during the invasion of Prague by the Soviet Union in 1968, “Exiles”, a meditation made after Koudelka left Czechoslovakia; And “Gypsies”, which documented the life of Roma communities across Europe.
“I thought it was a timely play,” explains Toh. “We talked about alienation, we talked about displacement, and it was a man who was moved, but made the trip a force.”
The first exhibition of Toh, which will open in the fall of 2026, examines the spread of art photography, also known as pictorialism, around the world of the 1880s in the 1960s. The movement, composed of clubs of cameras and societies which sought to connect to the artistic possibilities of photography, is generally associated with artists of the 19th century Alfred Stieglit and Edward Steichen. Toh aims to bring in other practitioners, including Lang Jingshan, one of the most eminent Chinese art photographers, and the avant-garde German Ilse Bing. “It was one of those movements that reached the blow in the world and was so active,” explains Toh. “It went through (a period) when countries were trying to gain independence. He saw through all these different quarters. ”
Tate's mission statement is to seek the best of “modern and contemporary international art”. In Toh, he named someone who does not lack ideas on where to look for. “One of the new research subjects I offer is post-photography or expanded photography,” she said, emphasizing the way social media has changed the way we use photography and the rise of image generators. “All this affects the practice of art,” she says. “Even if practitioners are young enough at the moment and we may want to observe it longer, I think we have to start paying attention.”
Aging is another subject that she began to see in a more contemporary work. “It's a bit of feeling in society today,” she says. “I think simple stories resonate with people. I love conceptual art, but I also think now, who are the visitors who come to the tate, and how can we show things that will worry about? ”
Charmaine Toh with a conversation with Robert Zhao Renhu on May 11 as part of the Tate Modern Birthday Weekender Weekender, marking the 25th year of the gallery
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