Invisible with Ryan Lee

Ryan Lee is the founder of Hip Xiong Photo Studio, Singapore’s first and only wet plate photography studio since independence and After Dark Room, Singapore’s only other analog portrait Studio.

Prior to that, Ryan has 15 years of experience leading and managing creative teams in entertainment and lifestyle companies, ad agencies and tech startups.

His affinity with analog photography developed during his growing up years when film was the default medium. His late grandfather, who used to work for the Cathay-Keris film production company, was a big influence for Ryan.

Where people would normally develop their 35mm film negatives to photographs, Ryan’s grandfather would instead develop them into positive slides and Ryan would spend many hours of his childhood viewing his grandfather’s slides on a lightbox through a loupe.

After his Secondary education, Ryan pursued a diploma in Film and Media studies at Ngee Ann Polytechnic where he topped his cohort for Experimental Films. It was during that same period when Ryan was introduced to a film by Chris Marker entitled La Jetée (1962). A black and white film made up almost entirely of still images. That film would prove to be an anchor to his analog photography roots.

Ryan started Hip Xiong Photo Studio in late 2019. Being able to create a photographic image from scratch using the wet plate collodion method is as purist as it sounds but Ryan’s goal is to demystify and refine the process to make it more accessible to anyone who is fascinated by its unique aesthetic. Ryan hopes that whoever steps through the doors of Hip Xiong Photo Studio would have a sense of traveling back in time, when the pace was slower and people took time and care to make things with their hands. Eventually when they leave through the same door, they take with them a piece of photographic history - a time capsule for generations to come.

In 2021, Ryan started After Dark Room. Unlike the time sensitive nature and limitations of wetplate photography, After Dark Room incorporates traditional photography darkroom techniques to capture analog portraits for the more spontaneous audience, allowing more shots and experimentation for both the photographer and the customer.