About the Photographer - Alexander Manton
Family background
There are two distinct threads that run through my family tree: a love of Asia and a sense of adventure.
My great grandmother sailed from the United States to China in 1884. She was a single woman and a Methodist missionary. Her calling was to help the women in China with education and to help stop the practice of foot binding. My great grandfather sailed to Singapore in 1888, stayed there for two years, and then moved to China. They met there and were married soon after. In all, they started 100 schools and two hospitals. Those were not easy times. The family in China made it through the Boxer Rebellion (1899), the Revolution of 1911, the invasion by the Japanese (1937), and then the Communist uprising (1949).
Different parts of my family continued these adventures in Asia in their own way. In WW2, my grandfather walked out of Burma for three months to escape the Japanese. My great uncle started the first hospital in the remotest area of Borneo (there were still head hunters!). In 1957, when he was only 17 years old, my father rode a 500cc Norton motorcycle from Singapore to London. In the early 60’s, my parents drove a little VW Bug from where Alexander the Great was born in Greece to where he died in Pakistan. Interestingly enough, in Afghanistan, they picked up an Australian backpacker whose son now lives five minutes from us on the Sunshine Coast! Talk about small world experiences!
The China connections continued. In 1972, my parents met Zhou Enlai, the first Premier of the People’s Republic of China, in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. During the visit, my mother was asked what a nice gift from China to the US would be, and what would she suggest the US give China. Her suggestion was for the US to give China a ten speed bicycle and for China to give the US a panda. Its hard to say if this was a direct result of her suggestions, but both of these things happened soon after their visit. My parents were instrumental in bringing “normalised” relations between China and the US, paving the way for Kissinger’s trip and then Nixon’s trip to China after that.
With a family history like that, I was destined to not just live a quiet life in the suburbs! I attended Woodstock School in India and that’s where I caught the “Asia bug” myself, which continues until today.
In an age of fleeting moments and fleeting images, fine art prints give much needed space to images that deserve a longer life span.
Career
I learned to love photography in my teens while pouring through the pages of National Geographic Magazine and learning all I could about the photographers behind it and how I could become one of them. I never made it to National Geographic but I have shot for Time, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, Forbes, Fortune, and many other international publications, as well as for some of the largest corporations in the world.
What I liked most about those assignments were the people that I met along the way. When I was filming Lee Kwan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore, for the second time, he didn’t remember my name but he remembered the exact year that my great grandmother had sailed to China, as I told him her story on our first photoshoot. I was tasked by Time Magazine go to Bangladesh and to do a cover shot of Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who is now the nation’s President. I fainted in front of him because it was so hot. I woke up with my head in his lap and being fanned by a Nobel Prize winner!
Fine Art and Film
Photography has always been more or less a business to me. I loved it but it was still work. My recent switch to Fine Art Photography has been exhilarating. I have the excitement to get up at 5am to catch the morning light. I want to push boundaries and make the shots next month be better than the ones last month.
After decades of shooting with digital cameras, I’m recently getting into film again. But the fact that film is so expensive now forces me to really think about what I am doing, making every shot count, and slow down. It is almost a meditative process now. Add to it that one of my cameras is the same age that I am (60 years old!) and you’ll understand why it is so slow.
Current Photographic Direction
A few years ago, I took a photo in a temple in Cambodia that started something in me. I still think it is one of the best shots I've ever taken. It stands 1.5 meters high in the gallery. It is the first photo I’ve taken that made me feel like I was an adventurer in a foreign land (remember my family history…). I felt like Lara Croft was going to be Tomb Raiding right in front of me. Or Indiana Jones was going to come out and say, “don’t go in there, kid, people never come out!”. I’m interested in giving people that excitement of being the first person to find an ancient temple ruins in the jungle. I welcome you to come have an adventure in Asia with me.
The fact that film is so expensive now forces me to really think about what I am doing, making every shot count, and slow down. It is almost a meditative process now.
