The first set of photographs Charmaine Toh sought to acquire for the Tate’s collection after she started work as its new photography curator last year was a series made during the Vietnam war. The museum holds significant work on the conflict already. Don McCullin’s 1968 photograph of a US marine waiting inside a civilian’s house, anxiously looking out through the window, was the poster for the museum’s 2019 retrospective on the war photographer. But Toh wanted the newly acquired works, made by the Vietnamese photographer Võ An Khánh in the 1960s and 1970s, to tell a different story.
One of the images shows a group of nurses under a shelter in south Vietnam’s U Minh forest. Knee-deep in water, they are waiting for a patient on a stretcher. Another shows children in a makeshift outdoor classroom holding up their blackboards. “We are so used to seeing war photographs, often action shots or soldiers,” says Toh, sitting in the spacious corner office usually occupied by Tate director Maria Balshaw (she is away) on London’s Southbank. “But when you look at the Vietnamese photos of the war, it’s daily life. It’s not grenade throwing. So, suddenly, this definition of war photography is turned around, because what does war mean for the people?”
Khánh’s photography is important in its own right, says Toh, but in bringing that work into a museum like Tate, it takes on a new significance, challenging certain narratives entrenched within the collection. “What possibilities might there be for us to then read Don McCullen’s photographs in a different way?” she says.
Toh has been considering such questions since she took on her role at the Tate, one of the most coveted in photography, just over a year ago. The curator of international photography is the figurehead of the Tate’s photographic collection, responsible for building it through acquisitions and curating exhibitions and free-to-visit displays across its four museums in London, Liverpool and St Ives. It’s a weighty role in British art. “You are, in a very real sense, building a canon,” Toh says of curating in a museum. “We don’t want to really use that word, but you are.” And an important one, as the museum tries to tackle a funding deficit left over from the pandemic and a more than 20 per cent drop in visitors compared with pre-2020.
The appeal of the role for Toh, who relocated from her native Singapore for the job, was in being able to champion one of Tate’s great strengths. “The Tate has always had a very international focus and they’ve always been very interested in transnational narratives,” she says. Toh’s desire to show “expanded histories”, which, “back in the day was called global art history” is, as she sees it, “why they’ve hired me at this point in time”.
Sculpting the mass of photographic history into a shapely narrative for the general public is a familiar task for Toh, who arrived at the Tate after an eight-year spell as curator at National Gallery Singapore. But London is new. Toh was born in Singapore and studied economics as an undergraduate, “largely because Asian parents expect their children to go into something that’s useful,” she says with a smile. She used up all her extra credits studying art history, though, having loved practical art classes at school.
She went on to do a PhD in art history, before going into photography curation in a contemporary art centre and, eventually, to Singapore’s main art museum, where she started to become interested in modern and historical photography. The area was exciting, she says, because there was a real urgency to it in Singapore. With no market for art photography and a tropical climate that literally melted photographs into “bricks”, families were throwing the work away as practitioners died. So she began the task of meeting artists and cataloguing their work. The result was a lauded exhibition titled Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia in 2022, the first survey of the history of photography in the entire region.
In London, Toh is astounded at the price of a single tube journey and misses Singapore’s abundance of food that is both good and cheap (“I haven’t overcome that psychological barrier to convince myself to pay £16 for a bowl of noodles,” she said in an interview after getting the job). But, though big institutions are familiar ground for her, she has found British museums, with their freely accessible Rothkos and Turner sketchbooks, “amazing”. And the Tate’s in particular. Sometimes at the end of a particularly long day, she goes down into the Giacometti rooms in the Tate’s basement “to relax”. “It’s dark,” she says gleefully. “So calming.”
Toh is only the third photography curator the Tate has had. The position was inaugurated in 2009 by Simon Baker, who staged blockbusters such as The Radical Eye, prints from Elton John’s collection of modernist photography of the 1920s to the 1950s. Baker was succeeded in 2018 by Osaka-born art historian Yasafumi Nakamori, who oversaw an exhibition of South African photographer Zanele Muholi, which travelled to six European museums, and a recent show focused on British photography in the 1980s. Catherine Wood, Tate Modern’s director of programmes and chief curator, says Toh has been hired for her experience in making exhibitions for a wide audience as well as her perspective shaped by knowledge of east and south-east Asian art and photography.
It all sounds rather serious, but Toh’s first intervention in the gallery is delightfully playful. The free display pairs Salvador Dalí’s lobster telephone, a favourite of the Tate audience, with a series of photographs of strange animal and plant species by the contemporary Singaporean photographer Robert Zhao Renhui. One shows an artificially dyed aquarium fish in a particularly sought-after shade of “Mekong Deep Blue”, another a square apple sold in a department store in South Korea. Some subjects are real and others are inventions of the artist. “It’s a museum that is open to these unusual pairings,” Toh says. “How can we rethink the lobster telephone in today’s post-truth era and how can you look at Robert Zhao Renhui’s contemporary, speculative fiction with respect to surrealism?”
A more recent room contains a display of the 20th-century Czech photographer Josef Koudelka. Toh wanted a “clean, classical hang” of work pulled from his three signature projects: “Invasion”, made during the Soviet Union’s invasion of Prague in 1968, “Exiles”, a meditation made after Koudelka left Czechoslovakia; and “Gypsies”, which documented the lives of Roma communities across Europe.
“I thought it was a timely room,” says Toh. “We’ve been talking about alienation, we’ve been talking about displacement, and this is a man who was displaced, yet made the displacement a strength.”
Toh’s first exhibition, which will open in autumn 2026, looks at the spread of art photography, also known as pictorialism, across the world from the 1880s to the 1960s. The movement, composed of camera clubs and societies that sought to tune into the artistic possibilities of photography, is typically associated with 19th-century artists Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. Toh aims to bring in other practitioners, including Lang Jingshan, one of the most prominent Chinese art photographers, and the avant-garde German Ilse Bing. “It was one of those movements that reached out globally and was so active,” says Toh. “It went through [a period] when countries were trying to gain independence. It saw through all these different shifts.”
Tate’s mission statement is to seek out the best in “international modern and contemporary art”. In Toh, it has appointed someone who is not short on ideas of where to look. “One of the new research topics that I’m proposing is post-photography or expanded photography,” she says, pointing to the ways that social media has changed how we use photography and to the rise of image generators. “All of that is affecting art practice,” she says. “Even if the practitioners are quite young at the moment and we might want to observe it for longer, I think we need to start paying attention.”
Ageing is another subject she has begun to see in more contemporary work. “It’s a bit about feeling displaced in society today,” she says. “I think simple stories resonate with people. I love conceptual art, but I’m also now thinking, who are the visitors coming to the Tate, and how can we show things that they’ll care about?”
Charmaine Toh with be in conversation with Robert Zhao Renhui on May 11 as part of Tate Modern’s Birthday Weekender, marking the gallery’s 25th year
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