QUICK LINKS: Career Highlights | Interviews | Teaching Photography
TAY Kay Chin (aka Kay-Chin TAY to most of his American friends) is a Singaporean photographer who works mainly in the documentary and photojournalistic genres.
He spent more than a decade in newspapers in Singapore and the US, working his way up from photographer to presentation editor.
Since leaving his last full-time newspaper job in 2001, Kay Chin has been creating meaningful independent projects that are grounded in his strong belief in powerful images and storytelling.
In 2003, he was named one of 12 Hasselblad Masters of the world, in recognition of his work Panoramic Singapore. The same year, he co-founded, together with Objectifs – Centre For Photography & Filmmaking, one of Southeast Asia’s first photography workshops, Shooting Home. From 2009 to 2015, he anchored the photojournalism modules at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication & Information at Nanyang Technological University. In this capacity, he worked with many emerging photojournalists and documentary photographers on long-term visual storytelling projects.
In 2010, he co-founded PLATFORM, a photography collective to promote photojournalism and documentary work in Singapore through regular talks, panels and presentations at Sinema and the National Museum of Singapore. As a run-up to the 50th anniversary of Singapore attaining political independence, Kay Chin and the PLATFORM team launched the TwentyFifteen.sg initiative to publish 20 books, containing 15 images each, by 20 Singaporean photographers. From 2013, TwentyFifteen.sg published almost one book every month, culminating in an exhibition featuring all 20 books at Jendela (Visual Arts Space) at Esplanade–Theatres by the Bay in 2015.
Building on TwentyFifteen.sg, he created +50 This Is Singapore, a two-volume compilation of works by up-and-coming photographers based in Singapore. In 2018, he was invited by Pera Museum in Istanbul, Turkey to curate an exhibition, Singapore Unseen, based on the two book projects.
In 2020, he was a judge for the Reportage division of the 77th Pictures of the Year, a prestigious photojournalism and documentary photography competition held annually at the Missouri School of Journalism. He was also a Faculty Member for the Missouri Photo Workshop in 2020 and 2021. From 2019 to 2021, he was a nominator for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass.
In 2021, he co-founded Pictures of the Year Asia(POY Asia) with Lynden Steele, Director of Pictures of the Year International, and both of them are currently POY Asia’s Co-Directors. The other Founding Advisors of POY Asia are Prashant Panjiar, Tanya Habjouqa and Maye-E Wong. After spearheading POY Asia for four years, he relinquished his leadership roles in 2024.
Kay Chin, a 1992 photojournalism graduate from the University of Missouri, has exhibited in Turkey, USA, Australia, China, South Korea, Thailand, Italy, Hong Kong, Bangladesh and Singapore. His photographs are collected by institutional and private collectors around the world.
Besides commercial and personal projects, he devotes more and more of his time to championing photography, curating, writing and consulting.
Email: kaychin@taykaychin.com
Mobile: +65 9187 6351