Sze Tsung Leong


Whether I am working in Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Egypt, Mexico, India, Kenya, Belgium, or Japan, my photographs are ultimately realized in New York. Here, the weeks of thought, research, planning, travel, exploration, and shooting materialize in visual form at the several labs I use. One of them is My Own Color Lab, where I regularly rent a darkroom. In the lab, the vastness and complexity of the world I try to depict is compressed onto the spaces of my photographic prints—projected by the light of the enlarger's bulbs from negatives onto light-sensitive paper, revealed through chemistry, and taped onto a viewing board where I spend many hours pushing the print to arrive at a visually meaningful culmination of what it took to get there.